Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film 9789048529353

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Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film

Daniel Mourenza

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: From left to right: Margot von Brentano, Valentina Kurella, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Glück, Bianca Minotti, Bernard von Brentano, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Berlin, New Year’s Eve 1931. Source: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Elisabeth-Hauptmann-Archiv 758. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 017 4 e-isbn 978 90 4852 935 3 doi 10.5117/9789462980174 nur 670 © D. Mourenza / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

To Jan Sieber (1982–2018), in memoriam

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to a number of individuals who have contributed directly or indirectly to the completion of this book, a project that began around 2010. I am especially grateful to the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Over the years, I have realized what an amazing space for research and critical discussion it was and how lucky I was to carry out my research there. I wish to express my gratitude especially to Diane Morgan and Gail Day for their guidance and advice throughout and to Marcel Swiboda for his useful feedback. I am also profoundly indebted to Simon Constantine, Fiona Allen, Jan D. Cox, Stefano Calzati, Chrysi Papaioannou, Lenka Vrablikova, Amy Charlesworth, James Lavender, Joanna Wolfarth, Claire Hope, Luisa Corna, Lara Eggleton, Swen Steinhauser, Leila Nassereldein, and Rose-Anne Gush for their help and support during all these years. During this time, I had the opportunity to attend a number of very enlightening events and conferences on Walter Benjamin and critical theory, which shaped my understanding and knowledge on this topic. I was able to engage in enriching debates in Rome, Leiden, Girona, Frankfurt, London, Oxford, Dublin, and Palestine, among other places; these discussions have had a great impact on this project. In particular, I am grateful to Matthew Charles, Sebastian Truskolaski, Sami Khatib, Marc Berdet, Uwe Steiner, Jörg Zimmer, Carol Jacobs, Peter Fenves, Tim Beasley-Murray, Paula Schwebel, Silvia Baglini, Andrew Benjamin, Maria Teresa Costa, Nélio Conceição, Stefano Marchesoni, Orr Scharf, Susan Buck-Morss, Betty Schulz, Jan Sieber, Janik Avila, and Jacob Bard-Rosenberg. I also wish to stress my gratitude to Esther Leslie and Carolin Duttlinger, particularly for all their support in helping me to pursue an academic career. Special mention should be made to Sam Dolbear for reading and commenting on the final draft of the manuscript. I also wish to thank Ursula Marx and Sabine Wolf, from the Walter Benjamin Archiv and the Akademie der Künste, for their help with the acquisition of images. In addition, I would especially like to thank Liz Stainforth and Danny Evans, my best readers and critics. Finally, I wish to thank Diana Battaglia for always being there and giving me all the support I needed to carry out this project.

Contents Introduction

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1. Anthropological Materialism and the Aesthetics of Film

27

2. Soviet Film: The Giant Laboratory of Technological Innervation

87

3. Film and the Aesthetics of German Fascism

117

4. Charlie Chaplin: The Return of the Allegorical Mode in Modernity

153

5. Mickey Mouse: Utopian and Barbarian

195

Conclusion: Benjamin’s Belated Aktualität

235

Bibliography

243

Index

253

Introduction It was 24 January 1926. Walter Benjamin had been in Moscow for over a month before he managed to fulfil one of the objectives that had first motivated his trip to the new Soviet capital: to watch Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925). Willy Haas, the editor of Die literarische Welt and a prominent film critic, had commissioned Benjamin to write a rejoinder to an article critical of Battleship Potemkin, written by the playwright and novelist Oscar A. H. Schmitz. Perhaps spurred on by Benjamin’s trip to Moscow—which had been, in turn, partially financed by Martin Buber as an advance for the article he committed to write for Die Kreatur1—Haas had planned to devote a special issue of Die literarische Welt to the culture of the ‘New Russia’, which would eventually include three of Benjamin’s articles. Film was to play a central role in the issue. Haas would write a review of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (Mat, 1926) and Benjamin, apart from his reply to Schmitz, would write an overview of Soviet cinema. After a long wait, Benjamin spent five hours in a small screening room in the company of only a translator. The programme consisted of three films: Mother, Battleship Potemkin, and Yakov Protazanov’s detective comedy The Trial of the Three Million (Protsess o tryokh millionakh, 1926). Benjamin was exhausted, leaving the room before the third film ended. The last film, a comic thriller based on a play by Italian author Umberto Notari, starred Igor Ilyinsky, an actor he had seen a few days prior, in a film he detested. Benjamin, in fact, had attempted to watch Battleship Potemkin weeks earlier, on 16 December. However, when he arrived in the room in which it was being screened, the film was entering the final act. Benjamin did not enjoy watching Potemkin for the second time. In his diary, he recorded that it had been ‘an exhausting, unpleasant day in every respect’, describing it as ‘quite a chore sitting through that many films in succession with no musical accompaniment’.2 Benjamin wrote his fierce critique of 1 Benjamin effectively wrote the long article ‘Moskow’, published in Die Kreatur, 2:1 (1927–1928), pp. 71–101; also published in the Selected Writings (SW2, pp. 22–46). 2 Benjamin, ‘Moscow Diary’, p. 103.

Mourenza, D., Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462980174_intro

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Schmitz’s article two days later, on the evening of 26 January, when he was in decidedly better spirits. The result was a sarcastic text in which he portraits Schmitz as a bourgeois intellectual who is not able to discuss the film either from a cinematic or a political standpoint. Benjamin qualifies his critique as typically bourgeois and argues sarcastically (not without a somewhat masculinist tone) that, for the decadent bourgeoisie, ‘art can venture as much as it likes into the most disreputable back alleys as long as it remains a good girl in politics and does not start dreaming of class warfare’.3 Although the article centres especially on criticizing the way that Schmitz formulates his critique, Benjamin—despite his experience—vehemently defends the film, especially its depiction of the collective and the space in which their battle for freedom takes place. He also opposes the portrayal of the collective in Battleship Potemkin and Mother to the monumental quality of the productions of the German film company UFA (Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft). Moscow remained a fortress for Benjamin. He adduced several reasons for his failure to penetrate the city: the inclement weather, his inability to understand Russian, and the necessity to rely on translations, not least the lack of affection. His relationship to Soviet film was similar. When, on 5 January, he went to the Arbat cinema on his own to see Dziga Vertov’s One-Sixth of the World (Shestaya chast mira, 1926), a film that had premiered in Moscow only a few days earlier, Benjamin recognized that much of the film escaped him. 4 It was only after discussing it with Bernhard Reich—Asja Lācis’s partner and Benjamin’s main guide to Russian culture—that he adventured to write about the film, becoming a central part of his panoramic piece of Soviet cinema, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’ (1927). He even attempted to acquire some film stills to accompany the article, although, eventually, Pansky—an acquaintance of Reich who worked for the State film offices—discouraged him because ‘the film was not to be mentioned abroad, its footage contained clips from foreign films, their precise provenance was not even clear, and complications were to be feared’.5 The critique of the film in the article is unfavourable. Benjamin cites it, alongside Soviet comedies, as an example of Russians’s uncritical adoption of technology. He also argues that the film, in its attempt to show the vast regions of the 3 Ibid., n106. A draft of the article was written in the last page of the manuscript of Moscow Diary, although it is considerably shorter than the final text. In the English version, translated by Richard Sieburth and edited by Gary Smith, this draft is included as a footnote. 4 Ibid., p. 69. 5 Ibid., p. 104.

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USSR, ends up being a mere description of peoples and landscapes. Benjamin had, in short, a conflictive relationship with Soviet cinema. In his diary, for example, he wrote that ‘Russian film itself, apart from a few outstanding productions, is not all that good on the average’.6 To a contemporary film historian, Benjamin’s judgements may appear overblown, given that the films he had the opportunity to see are now regarded as Soviet cinema’s finest works. His critique of Ilyinsky is similarly considered as unfair.7 Despite this, Benjamin is often closely associated with Soviet film, and more generally with avant-garde cinema. If anything, Benjamin’s views on Soviet cinema show that he was never a film expert nor a connoisseur, and that he did not understand the formal differences between Soviet directors, then engaged in heated debates around the medium and its relation to the political. Benjamin’s understanding of montage, for example, was always basic, even pre-technological. For him, montage consisted of the entrance of an actor into the frame or even their very gestures, rather than the change of shot. It is for this reason that Chaplin became for Benjamin the model of film montage—understanding montage as a physicality enacted through gesture. Benjamin was probably unaware of, and could hardly have understood, the debates on film montage held among Soviet directors whose films he had managed to see: Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Lev Kuleshov.8 After the two articles on Soviet film, Benjamin’s second incursion into film criticism concerned Chaplin. On 8 February 1929, and again in Die literarische Welt, Benjamin published a review of The Circus (1928) under the title ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’. Chaplin had already appeared in the articles on Soviet cinema, in which Benjamin (somewhat misguidedly) lamented the shortage of Chaplin’s films imported into the Soviet Union. In the 1929 review, Benjamin defines The Circus as the product of a mature Chaplin. According to Benjamin, Chaplin was the first director to construct films based on a theme and its variations—in opposition to action and suspense—as Soviet cinema would later do. The old Chaplin, Benjamin says, has masterfully learnt to repeat his best motifs; as an example, Benjamin discusses the chase scene in the fairground marionette in The Circus. At the end of the review, Benjamin reflects—through an article by the surrealist author Philippe Soupault—on the revolutionary character of laughter, a 6 Ibid., p. 55. 7 See Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine, p. 72. 8 Benjamin saw Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926) on 16 December. The film was screened after Battleship Potemkin, in the same session in which Benjamin tried to watch the film for the first time.

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topic that reappears in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939).9 Another of Benjamin’s favourites, Mickey Mouse, made his appearance in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) as the harbinger of a new, positive barbarism. Mickey Mouse had begun to attract Benjamin’s attention after a conversation with Kurt Weill and Gustav Glück in 1931. Benjamin pencilled down ideas arising from this conversation in a note entitled ‘Mickey Mouse’. The destructive energy of Mickey Mouse might have motivated Benjamin to write ‘The Destructive Character’; this text was also influenced by Glück and was also written in 1931. Over the years, however, Benjamin acknowledged—through the persistence of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno—the problems of the mouse’s destructive frenzy, and Benjamin’s attraction to Mickey Mouse waned in parallel with other intellectuals. If, in the first two versions of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Mickey Mouse appears alongside Chaplin, he would disappear from the third, 1939 version. These first short texts that Benjamin wrote about film would form the basis of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, his longest and arguably most important text on film, in addition to being one of his most studied and discussed essays. To his argument around Soviet film, Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse, Benjamin adds other films, such as Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ (dir. Fred Niblo, 1925), Cleopatra (dir. Cecil B. Demille, 1934), Napoleon (dir. Abel Gance, 1927), and Frederick the Great (dir. Arzén von Cserépy, 1922–1923) as examples of historical films. Furthermore, he adds Irrende Seelen (dir. Carl Froelich, 1921) and La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) to reflect on the performance and casting of the actors. In the third version, he also adds two overtly revolutionary films: Misère au Borinage (dir. Joris Ivens and Henri Storck, 1933) and, this time without any critique, Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934). Benjamin, however, does not give further analysis of these films and there remains suspicion as to whether he ever saw them. This is indeed a trope, but also a difficulty, in Benjamin’s engagement with cinema: He barely analyses specific films, as if the films can speak for themselves. We know that Benjamin was never an expert in film, but it remains disputed whether he regularly frequented the cinema. Thanks to biographical texts, we have a better—though scarce—idea of which films he most enjoyed. In his biography of Benjamin, Gershom Scholem mentions that, when they spent some time together in Paris in 1927, they went to the cinema often. He also mentions that Benjamin admired the actor Adolphe Menjou so 9 Hereafter, I will refer to this text as the ‘Work of Art’ essay and will specify the version if necessary.

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much that he attended every film he appeared in.10 This interest is confirmed in a letter to Alfred Cohn from the same period, in which Benjamin refers to A Social Celebrity (dir. Malcolm St. Clair, 1926) and Blonde or Brunette (dir. Richard Rosson, 1927), both of which star Menjou.11 Benjamin was definitely more inclined to popular cinema, both as a moviegoer and film critic, than he was to art film. We have a clearer picture of this thanks to his letters. In his correspondence with Gretel Adorno, with whom he was especially comfortable discussing popular films, Benjamin confessed that he found Katharine Hepburn ‘superb’ after he saw her for the first time in a film in the summer of 1938.12 The film in question could have been Bringing Up Baby (dir. Howard Hawks, 1938) or Stage Door (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1937), a film in which she starred along with Adolphe Menjou.13 In an earlier letter, Benjamin describes Norman McLeod’s 1933 film version of Alice in Wonderland, which he saw after reading Lewis Carroll’s book, as ‘an extraordinary affair’.14 He also confided that he enjoyed George Cukor’s film Dinner at Eight (1933).15 To another friend, Kitti Marx-Steinschneider, Benjamin wrote that John Ford’s Lost Patrol (1934) was ‘not entirely unworthy’ of the book on which it was based, Death in the Desert, by Philip Macdonald (1927).16 These are the films that, in one way or another, we are certain he saw and, therefore, should be considered as possible influences on his thought on the subject. 10 Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 162. 11 Letter to Alfred Cohn, 6 October 1927 (Gesammelte Briefe, III, p. 293). 12 Letter to Gretel Adorno, 20 July 1938 (Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin: Correspondence 1930–1940, p. 230). 13 Howard Eiland has suggested that the film might be either Bringing Up Baby or Holiday (dir. George Cukor, 1938) (‘On Benjamin’s Theory of Film’). The latter was released in the United States on 15 June 1938, but it was not shown in Europe before September of the same year, which makes that possibility unlikely. Bringing Up Baby was premiered on 18 February 1938 and arrived in Denmark on 11 April 1938. Since Benjamin was not in the capital, but in Svendborg, it is possible that the film was screened a few months later. Finally, Stage Door was a production from the previous year, released in the USA in September, but shown in Europe on varying dates. The problem with claiming this film as the one that Benjamin saw is that, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the film was not released in Denmark until 16 August 2018, after the date on Benjamin’s letter. The other complication that arises from the release dates is that the film was shown in French cinemas from November 1937. Thus, if it is true that Benjamin went to see all the f ilms with Menjou, it is unlikely that Benjamin had not yet seen the f ilm and therefore Katharine Hepburn. 14 Letter to Gretel Adorno, after 9 January 1936 (Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin: Correspondence 1930–1940, p. 176). 15 Ibid., c.3 March 1934, p. 91. 16 Letter to Kitty Marx-Steinschneider, 15 April 1936 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 526).

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Benjamin’s film writings are scattered across articles, essays, notes, and letters, and they appear, at first sight, to be nothing but a fragmentary collection of thoughts on different figures and subjects, offering occasionally contradictory statements about the film apparatus. As such, these texts have often been discredited for failing to provide a clear account of Benjamin’s theories regarding film aesthetics. A closer analysis, however, will reveal that they must be understood in a specific, shared context, and in relation to other ongoing theoretical concerns. Gertrud Koch, for example, claimed that the ‘Work of Art’ essay was ‘the sole long and coherent text which the author wrote […] on the subject of the new medium of the masses—film’.17 I want to show that, while the other texts devoted entirely or partially to film may seem incoherent and fragmentary, they form part of a single project: to defend film as a privileged medium in which humans could rehearse a better relationship with technology. This is not to say that all these writings form a coherent whole, given that fractures, turning points, and inconsistencies appear throughout his writings. Nonetheless, threads run through each of these texts that show Benjamin’s interest in film to be, not a subsidiary subject, but a pivotal phenomenon to theorize other concerns central in his oeuvre, such as the possibility of experience in modernity, the creation of a collective body, and the mediation (qua medium, not means) of technology. In other words, Benjamin’s writings on film are reflections of much broader historical and political phenomena. In terms of classification, it is clear that Benjamin’s writings on film escape any coherent label. Some of his interventions in Die literarische Welt could be defined as film criticism, while the ‘Work of Art’ essay could be better described as ‘cinema theory’ or ‘media theory’, although the concept of ‘film theory’ could also apply to some of his reflections. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, discards the term ‘film theory’ and opts instead for ‘theory of cinema’, because, according to him, Benjamin’s arguments about the discontinuity of the film process and its impact on the audience concern both aesthetic and historical considerations.18 Without dismissing Elsaesser’s point, I have decided to define Benjamin’s approach to film in this book as ‘film aesthetics’, or, more generally, the ‘aesthetics of film’. I do not attempt to impose this term over other possible definitions. Indeed, Benjamin’s ‘film aesthetics’ does not fit the traditional conception of this term, as it cannot be conceived within a traditional paradigm of aesthetics concerned with 17 Koch, ‘Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” Essay’, p. 205. 18 Elsaesser, ‘Cinema: The Irresponsible Signifier or “The Gamble with History”’, pp. 66–67.

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the philosophical consideration of beauty; it should rather be considered as part of Benjamin’s revaluation of aesthetics in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. In that text, Benjamin urges his readers to return to a radical conception of aesthetics, which alludes to perception and sensation, to understand the changes in reception and in the relationship between audience and artwork in film spectatorship. For him, cinema is consumed collectively and with the entire body; therefore, the traditional conception of aesthetics, which is based on the individual contemplation of the artwork with the sense of sight alone, was no longer appropriate. Benjamin’s aesthetics of film are, in this way, first and foremost interested in the changes that the technologies of reproduction have caused, not only in perception, but in the sensorium through which humans experience the world. This conception of f ilm aesthetics is, therefore, historical, if not anthropological. Unlike Benjamin, Adorno addresses his reflections on film precisely as questions about the ‘aesthetics of film’ and argues that any film aesthetics is ‘inherently concerned with society’.19 For this reason, Adorno argues that, even if it focusses purely on its technological nature, film aesthetics must include a sociology of cinema. It is no accident that Benjamin’s film aesthetics, which departs from questions of film technology, develops a theory particularly focussed on issues of reception and spectatorship. For that reason, I will argue that Benjamin’s writings on cinema can be considered to have developed a different conception of the aesthetic; one that focusses on the historical transformation of the relationship between observer and artwork. In doing so, Benjamin attempts to locate this new art form historically, in the transformation of our aesthetic perception. For this purpose, he analyses the changes that film has caused in classical aesthetics through concepts such as play, as derived from Friedrich Schiller, and semblance, as borrowed from Goethe. Through the notion of ‘film aesthetics’, then, I will emphasize that Benjamin was not only concerned with issues related to the medium, but also with matters of representation, both in terms of content and form, fundamental to the new reconfiguration of space that film had initiated. This book will argue that Benjamin’s writings on film cannot be dissociated from broader themes in his oeuvre. As such, these writings become intertwined with the major themes of his work and shed new light on his thought. The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding Benjamin’s theories on film while, at the same time, illuminating the philosophical and political project that underlines them. I will argue that the theories that Benjamin developed regarding film are 19 Adorno, ‘Transparencies on Film’, p. 202.

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related to a latent notion of ‘anthropological materialism’ and, particularly, the way in which technology shapes and transforms the relation of human beings to the world. Some scholars have previously pointed to the connection between Benjamin’s writings on film and the concept of ‘anthropological materialism’ as envisaged in his 1929 essay on surrealism. For example, Miriam Hansen considers Benjamin’s writings on film in the tradition of anthropological materialism in her essay ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a OneWay Street’ (1999) and, more systematically, in ‘Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema’ (2004). Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen have also analysed this term and noted its interplay with Benjamin’s writings on film, especially with regard to Mickey Mouse—even if they did not discuss the role of anthropological materialism in Benjamin’s film and media theory.20 Nevertheless, the concept has not been given the prominence it deserves. In recent years, however, anthropological materialism has received renewed interest from a group of young scholars, namely Marc Berdet, Sami Khatib, and Jan Sieber, among others, who have grouped themselves under the umbrella of this term, which, as Berdet argues, is not only a category and a tradition, but also a process of sensibility and actuality.21 I would like to claim that my work also takes part in this project of restoring and rehabilitating this concept. Through the concept of ‘anthropological materialism’, I will argue that Benjamin’s writings on film are, first and foremost, concerned with an alternative reception of technology and the creation and organization of a collective body (Kollektivleib). It is worth noting that Benjamin’s idea of a collective body is far from political notions that equate a nation, a state, or any other community with a body that affirms its own identity. Benjamin’s collective body can better be described as an ‘eccentric body’, as Léa Barbisan has called it, a body without a clear identity or ego, a body that is always elusive and does not hold a coherent meaning.22 Benjamin grounds the creation of this collective body through the concept of ‘innervation’. For Benjamin, cinema acts as an exemplary space in which human beings can, through a rush of energy that regroups the apperceptions of the spectators, collectively 20 See Bolz and Van Reijen, ‘Anthropological Materialism’ and ‘Media Aesthetics’, in their book Walter Benjamin, pp. 55–69 and pp. 71–77. 21 ‘Anthropological Materialism’ is a project launched by an international and multidisciplinary research network, which seeks to promote new analyses of the ‘world actuality’ through the lens of this hitherto neglected paradigm (see Marc Berdet, ‘Seven Short Temporary Statements on Anthropological Materialism’). 22 See Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies. From Phenomenology to Marxism: Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on Embodiment’.

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adapt a non-instrumental—and, therefore, non-exploitative—technology onto their bodies, while simultaneously shaping a collective body. In the late Benjamin of ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1940), the conversion of energy into the somatic characteristic of ‘innervation’ is discussed in relation to Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921), but, in earlier texts, it is addressed as a transference of energy between the imagination—or that which is unreachable—and the body, associated in most cases with the child.23 Among other sources of energy, Benjamin argues that technology can provide the necessary energy to bring this collective body under control. When writing about the reception of technology by society, and film in particular, Benjamin often uses a vocabulary closely related to energy and the nervous system. Society is, as such, regarded in physiological terms as a body that receives its energy through technology. Concepts such as innervation, shock, and stimulation are mobilized to reflect on this relationship, as well as on the configurations of experience that technology makes possible. In fact, this vocabulary relating to energy and its effects on the body was very common in the writings about film in the 1910s and 1920s. Cinema was seen by many critics as a nervous stimulation of the senses, and words such as thrill, shock, and astonishment—which are later used by Benjamin—were commonly used in the film criticism of the time. The purpose of this book is manifold. It aims to shed new light on the scholarship on Benjamin by exploring in depth the role of technology and the human body in his oeuvre and, especially, his concept of ‘anthropological materialism’. More specifically, the book attempts to contribute to the existing, though short, scholarship on Benjamin and cinema, which has already been explored by scholars such as Esther Leslie,24 Howard Eiland,25 and, especially, Miriam Hansen, to whom this book is—as could not be otherwise—profoundly indebted. To date, the most thorough study of Benjamin’s writings on film is her Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, published posthumously in 2011. 23 For example, in the practice of children in ‘Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’, SW2, pp. 201–206, and in the figure of the child stretching the hands to grasp the moon as if it were the moon, in ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n124, and ‘A Different Utopian Will’, SW3, p. 135. 24 See ‘Playspaces of Anthropological Materialist Pedagogy: Film, Radio, Toys’; Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde, a book in which Benjamin is a central f igure; and her seminal Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, more concerned with technology; but in which film plays an important role. 25 Eiland has attempted to give a succinct account of Benjamin’s engagement with film for the book The Promise of Cinema in ‘On Benjamin’s Theory of Film’.

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This book collects her work, not only on Benjamin, but also on Kracauer and Adorno over the course of her career.26 Cinema and Experience can therefore be conceived as the culmination of Hansen’s work on Benjamin, which occupied the last 25 years of her life. Sadly, Miriam Hansen passed away in February 2011 at the age of 61, when this book was only in an embryonic form, and I was devouring her articles and books in my postgraduate office at the University of Leeds. She would never see her book published, which appeared only a few months after her death, and the great reverberations it had on the academic fields of Film Studies and Critical Theory. This book builds on her groundbreaking research and on some of her most important findings, such as the connection between Benjamin’s ‘anthropological materialism’ and his writings on film, the centrality of the concept of innervation in his theories around technology, and Benjamin’s enlarged conception of aura beyond an aesthetic category, among other such ideas. This book also attempts to expand some ideas that Hansen suggested but left underdeveloped. For example, I will address Benjamin’s interest in Chaplin in Chapter 4 as a rehabilitation of the allegorical in modernity, as Hansen implied in Cinema and Experience (curiously in the part of the book devoted to Kracauer’s Weimar writings).27 I will also contrast Benjamin’s theorization of Mickey Mouse with post-humanism, as Hansen succinctly hinted in her book and several authors after her, including myself, have hitherto explored.28 Departing from Hansen’s scholarship, this book attempts to offer a more comprehensive and exhaustive reading of Benjamin’s engagement with film aesthetics. For that reason, apart from providing a reading of Benjamin’s film writings informed by the concepts of ‘anthropological materialism’ and ‘innervation’, I will pay more attention to the films, directors, and actors with which—though sparely—Benjamin engaged. This book also attempts to contribute to Film Studies by giving a comprehensive account of Benjamin’s film writings and according him a position within the film theory and film criticism of his time. In fact, the recent wave of interest in Benjamin from Film Studies has allowed Benjamin to enter the canon of German classical film theory, a space from which he 26 These articles are: ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987); ‘Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 92:1 (1993); ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, Critical Inquiry, 25:2 (1999); ‘Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema’, October, 109 (2004); and ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry, 34 (2008). The chapters devoted to Benjamin in Cinema and Experience (Chapters 3 to 7) are revised and reworked versions of those articles. 27 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, pp. 47–48. 28 Ibid., p. 181.

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was previously excluded. For example, in Sabine Hake’s 1993 monograph on German film criticism before National Socialism, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933, Benjamin only appears in comparison with Siegfried Kracauer, since both theorized the urban space, its rhythms, and the visual pleasures that drive modern experience. In the recent anthology of film criticism from Germany and Austria, The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory 1907–1933 (2016), edited by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, Benjamin is given a much more central role. In the Introduction, the editors present him as one of the leading figures in film criticism, together with Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Bertolt Brecht, Lotte Eisner, Siegfried Kracauer, and Hans Richter. However, only three articles by Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’ and ‘Mickey Mouse’, are reprinted in this volume. In fairness, Benjamin’s work that can be catalogued as film criticism is considerably smaller when compared with those cited above, particularly Arnheim, Balázs, Eisner, and Kracauer, or with film critics such as Herbert Ihering, Kurt Tucholsky, and Willy Haas, who were much more prolific. The reason why the editors of this anthology grant Benjamin such a relevance today can perhaps be explained by the overall perspective of the volume: His work is not only concerned with what cinema is, that is, its own medium’s specific properties, but with what cinema ‘can be or ought to be’.29 Indeed, Benjamin’s film writings occupy this interstitial space between what film could offer and the specific—and many times limiting—uses of film. Perhaps for this reason, and despite being written over 80 years ago, Benjamin’s theories still speak to present-day readers who are interested in the ever-changing landscape of visual media. Furthermore, as this book will advance, Benjamin’s ‘promise of cinema’ is also a ‘promise of technology’. For him, technology bears within it a key to happiness (Glück). If humans manage to use technology without an instrumentalist and ultimately exploitative logic, Benjamin thought, technology will offer humanity all the potentials and dreams that humans have bestowed upon it. Cinema was, for Benjamin, a paradigmatic space to implement this relationship of interplay with technology, given that film forces the audience to confront technology in a playful way, avoiding the traumatic rapport bestowed by machines on an everyday basis. The cinemagoer could be empowered by the same dreams that the collective might entrust to technology—a technology that, in workplaces, in war, and even in the modern cityscape, had seemed to revolt against them. 29 Kaes, Baer, and Cowan, ‘Introduction’, in The Promise of Film, p. 1; from a quote by Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Preface to the 1957 Edition’, in Film as Art (emphasis added by the editors).

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It is worth noting, though, that Benjamin always uses the word Technik, which means both technique and technology, and covers both the material hardware of machines and the social and political relations derived from them, instead of Technologie, which bears connotations of a rational process.30 Technik is thus the space in which social relations, as well as the relationship between humans and nature, are played out. This conception, as Jan Sieber reminds us, cannot be understood as we usually understand technology, in the sense that it refers neither to a particular technological system nor to the sum of the technologies available in a given historical time.31 Benjamin’s conception of technology, as I will develop in Chapter 1, is rather non-instrumental, whereas, at the same time, it discloses a practical relationship with the world. In short, Benjamin’s Technik does not necessarily respond to our usual conception of technology. For that reason, other scholars have preferred to refer to it in its German original Technik, such as Esther Leslie, or as ‘technique’, like Sieber. Unlike them, in this book, I will use the word ‘technology’ to facilitate the reading—unless I want to stress its double meaning, in which case I will use the original German. The reader, however, should bear in mind that, every time I speak about technology in relation to Benjamin, I am referring to the term Technik with all its connotations. The aim of this book is, in short, to provide a framework for understanding Benjamin’s film aesthetics through the contextualization of this aspect of his thought within his wider oeuvre. To this end, I will devote a chapter to contextualize Benjamin’s film writings within particular themes and arguments in his oeuvre. In the following chapters, I will assess his writings on particular films, actors, and characters against the framework presented in the first chapter. Chapter 1 will thus introduce the concept of ‘anthropological materialism’ and will trace it from some early texts concerned with the body, such as ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’ (c.1922–1923), to One Way Street (1928) and ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929)—in which Benjamin defines the concept for the first time—to The Arcades Project (1927–1940) and the ‘Work of Art’ essay. I will argue that some concepts that are central to his writings on film, such as ‘collective body’, ‘second technology’, ‘innervation’, and ‘second nature’, should be understood in relation to Benjamin’s particular conception of the body. Through these terms, I will analyse the impact of technology upon the human body and the changes in sensorial experience caused by 30 For a more detailed discussion of the term Technik, see Esther Leslie’s preface to her Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, especially pages xi–xii. 31 Sieber, ‘Técnica’, p. 209.

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the arrival of film. I will argue that, for Benjamin, technology, by changing the human sensorium, also transformed the relationship between observer and artwork, subject and object. This transformation will be considered, on the one hand, through the concept of the ‘optical unconscious’ and, on the other, through the reformulation of the realm of aesthetics as aisthēsis, which Benjamin developed in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. Chapter 2 focusses on Benjamin’s writings on Soviet film. In this chapter, I analyse the two articles that Benjamin wrote on this topic in 1927 after his stay in Moscow. I will try to understand these early articles on film in connection with later texts such as ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) and the ‘Work of Art’ essay. I will argue that these two articles anticipate many themes that are more thoroughly developed in subsequent texts concerned with film and the politicization of art. This chapter will also discuss Benjamin’s insights about the use and conception of technology in the Soviet Union. Finally, I will address the question of Benjamin’s call for the politicization of aesthetics with regard to the different political groupings in the Soviet art scene through an account of his position in these debates, as well as his position on Soviet politics more generally. Chapter 3 deals with German cinema. Although Benjamin did not write extensively about German film, I will try to answer some important questions that arise from his texts on technology and, more specifically, on technological reproducibility. Benjamin discerned a failed reception of technology in Germany after the First World War. For that reason, I will analyse the consequences of such an adoption of technology through his polemics against Ernst Jünger and thereby assess the extent to which this bungled reception had an impact on German cinema. Drawing the theoretical framework from Benjamin’s remarks on the masses, I will analyse the film Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927) as an example of the ‘architectonic quality’ that Benjamin detected in UFA productions during the Weimar Republic.32 I will also analyse the films by Leni Riefenstahl as an illustration of the corrupted representation of the masses employed by the National Socialists. Finally, I will interpret the aestheticization of politics promoted by fascism from the point of view of Benjamin’s reconfiguration of aesthetics and the relationship between the historically constructed human nature and technology. I will argue that the aestheticization of politics demanded by Marinetti responded to a traditional conception of aesthetics that had been invalidated by the same technology through which he was to perceive a new form of beauty. 32 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 18.

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Chapter 4 analyses Charlie Chaplin in the context of a project to rehabilitate allegory in the 20th century. Chaplin will be evaluated in connection with the two other figures who form part of the same project: Kafka and Brecht. Benjamin approached each of these figures through the same concept of Gestus and the possibility of representing the alienating experience of modernity in a technologically saturated society. Benjamin discerned in f ilm the prospect of undoing the numbing of the senses, which had become deadened as a consequence of the shock experience of modern life. This chapter will analyse Chaplin as a paradigmatic cinematic figure to counteract the alienation of human beings in modernity through his gestic and allegorical performance. As this chapter will argue, Chaplin was, for Benjamin, able to mimic the fragmentary experience of modern human beings through the very structure of the film medium, exploiting the ‘productive use of the human being’s self-alienation’ that Benjamin assigned to film.33 Brecht and Kafka will provide clues to understand better the qualities that Benjamin so much appreciated in Chaplin. Chapter 5 focusses on Mickey Mouse. I will address this popular icon as a programmatic companion for Benjamin in his critique of humanism in the period of the ‘destructive character’. Through this, I am able to argue that the theoretical project of this later period was inherently associated with the anthropological-materialist programme of innervation in the technological organs of the collective, which had cinema at its heart. Benjamin, in fact, demands that this process of collective and technological innervation must be carried out by the Unmensch (inhuman) and the barbarian, of which Mickey Mouse was an exemplary exponent. For this reason, Benjamin’s fragments on Mickey Mouse will be read in conjunction with texts such as ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931), ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931), and ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933). Mickey Mouse appears, thus, as an example of the new, positive concept of barbarism that Benjamin develops in a period impoverished of experience and culture in general. Far from lamenting this loss, Benjamin adopts Mickey Mouse as a model for the incorporation of technology into the human body. Finally, in the Conclusion, I will evaluate to what extent Benjamin’s film aesthetics are suitable for analysing other films, apart from those considered in this book. Many scholars have argued that Benjamin’s theses on film were directed first and foremost to early cinema and, therefore, cannot be applied to subsequent films and traditions. I will claim that, nonetheless, Benjamin’s theories developed in and around his texts on 33 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 113 (italics in the original).

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film can be especially relevant for some theoretical questions arising today in relation to the adaptation of technology to the human body and to the tactility of new media. Through each of these chapters, I will thoroughly explore all the texts that Benjamin devoted to film in order to situate them within the continuing projects and fractures in his oeuvre. I also aim to provide a comprehensive framework from which Benjamin’s film writings can better be understood and contextualized around film theory at large. It is my hope that this book will inspire new approaches to Benjamin’s oeuvre while, at the same time, stimulating further research that takes his film aesthetics as point of departure for exploring more contemporary trends in Film Studies.

Bibliography Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin: Correspondence 1930–1940, ed. by Henri Lonitz and Christoph Gödde, trans. by Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Transparencies on Film’, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, 24–25 (1981–1982), pp. 199–205. Léa Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies. From Phenomenology to Marxism: Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on Embodiment’, Anthropology & Materialism, 1 (2017), pp. 1–15. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). — Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Briefe, ed. by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996–2000), III (1996). — ‘Moscow Diary’, October, 35 (1985), pp. 9–135. — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), II (1999). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), III (2002). Marc Berdet, ‘Seven Short Temporary Statements on Anthropological Materialism’, in Anthropological Materialism: From Walter Benjamin, and Beyond, available at (accessed 6 September 2019). Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, trans. by Laimdota Mazzarins (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996).

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Howard Eiland, ‘On Benjamin’s Film Theory’, The Promise of Cinema, 10 October 2016, available at (accessed 6 September 2019). Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinema: The Irresponsible Signifier or “The Gamble with History”: Film Theory or Cinema Theory’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 65–89. Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 179–224. — ‘Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney’, in South Atlantic Quarterly, 92:1 (1993), pp. 27–61. — ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, Critical Inquiry, 25:2 (1999), pp. 306–343. — ‘Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema’, October, 109 (2004), pp. 3–45. — ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry, 34 (2008), pp. 336–375. — Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 2012). Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde (London: Pluto Press, 2016). Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, eds., The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). Gertrud Koch, ‘Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” Essay’, in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 205–215. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000). — Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London/ New York: Verso, 2002). — ‘Playspaces of Anthropological Materialist Pedagogy: Film, Radio, Toys’, boundary 2, 45:2 (2018), pp. 139–156. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003). Jan Sieber, ‘Técnica’, en Glosario Walter Benjamin. Conceptos y figuras, ed. by Esther Cohen (México DF: UNAM, 2016), pp. 209–218.

1.

Anthropological Materialism and the Aesthetics of Film Abstract This chapter contextualizes Walter Benjamin’s film writings in relation to his concept of ‘anthropological materialism’. It argues that some concepts that are central to his writings on film, such as ‘collective body’, ‘second technology’, ‘innervation’, ‘second nature’, and ‘optical unconscious’ should be understood in relation to Benjamin’s particular conception of the body and the transformation of the human sensorium, made possible by the new paradigm of reception opened up by film’s technological nature. For Benjamin, this chapter argues, cinemas are conceived as exemplary training grounds to create a collective body through the innervation of the energy coming from the screen into the audience. Keywords: Walter Benjamin; anthropological materialism; innervation; film aesthetics; second technology; second nature; optical unconscious.

Walter Benjamin’s writings on f ilm are scattered across his life, in essays, reviews, notes, diary entries, convolutes, and letters. Despite their differences in length, style, and purpose, all these writings have something in common: They are primarily concerned with—indeed, they attempt to theorize—the changes in the human sensorium sparked by the arrival of film and the shifting relationship this established between technology and the body. This concern, in fact, was not new for Benjamin when he began to address film directly in 1927. He had begun to consider the incorporation of technology into the human body years before, in anthropological texts from the late 1910s and early 1920s. Benjamin’s f ilm writings can therefore be considered a continuation of earlier theoretical concerns, although they also represent changes in approach and vocabulary. Whereas his writings on technology and the body in the earlier 1920s sprang from a supposedly metaphysical perspective, those

Mourenza, D., Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462980174_ch01

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from the late 1920s adopt a more materialist approach. Even though many concepts reappear, they are reformulated to reflect shifting political and historical concerns. I will argue that these concerns about the interaction of body and technology should be examined through Benjamin’s notion of ‘anthropological materialism’. Benjamin only introduced the concept fleetingly. However, it epitomizes his interest in the historical changes to the human sensorium ushered in by new technologies. As such, this concept becomes central to understanding the project that lies behind Benjamin’s writings on f ilm.

Anthropological Materialism Benjamin did not use the notion of ‘anthropological materialism’ consistently throughout his writings. The notion appears often surreptitiously and it is difficult to render it with any stable definition. In most cases, the term is associated with the practice of the surrealists. In its first incarnation in his 1929 essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ and, a few years later, in ‘The Present Social Situation of the French Writer’ (1934), Benjamin defines the concept rather ambiguously as a mixture of political materialism and ‘physical creatureliness’.1 This strange fusion could be described, in other words, as a type of materialism whose point of departure is the physicality of the body—when the ‘body’ is not restricted to the individual. In these two texts, Benjamin explicitly distinguishes his anthropological materialism from the dialectical materialism of Nikolai Bukharin and Georgi Plekhanov, to escape certain metaphysical trends in orthodox Marxism. By contrast, Benjamin situates his materialism in a tradition that encompasses a variety of authors, from Johann Peter Hebel, Georg Büchner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Rimbaud, to Lautréamont. This legacy is unpacked in Convolute W of The Arcades Project. While arguing that the pedagogies of both Charles Fourier and Jean Paul should be studied in the context of anthropological materialism, Benjamin introduces the two different traditions from which the concept draws: a Germanic current of thought that, apart from the above-mentioned authors, includes the writers Karl Gutzkow and Gottfried Keller, and a French school which comprises the poets Rimbaud and Lautréamont, as well as the socialist utopian thinkers Fourier and Saint-Simon. Benjamin claims that, whereas the German current put the individual centre stage, the French instead focussed on the human 1

Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, SW2, p. 217.

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collective.2 Through these divergent traditions, Benjamin shows that his anthropological materialism is concerned with both the individual and the social, collective body. Benjamin also devotes one letter of his sketches of The Arcades Project (1927–1940) to this concept, which curiously becomes paired with sects: ‘p’ on ‘Anthropological Materialism, Sects’. In this convolute, Benjamin focusses on authors who, by criticizing patriarchy and its regulation through the institution of marriage, proposed a different social and sexual organization. One such book stands above all, Ma Loi d’avenir (1833), written by the feminist Saint-Simonian Claire Démar. In this book, Démar proposes to eradicate motherhood by taking newborn babies from their mothers and raising them by state-employed nurses, as a way to liberate men, women, and children from the ‘law of blood’, which is, according to her, the basis of the exploitation of humanity by humanity.3 Together with other critiques of marriage, by James de Laurence, Alphonse Toussenel, and Charles Fourier, Benjamin explores alternatives to patriarchy, proposing anthropological materialism as a way to open up new possibilities for, as he puts it in another convolute, the emancipation of the flesh.4 The fact that these early socialist thinkers based their utopias on the human body was, as Benjamin points out elsewhere, no accident.5 Through anthropological materialism, the body—both the individual and the social body—acts as the epistemological and phenomenological point of departure. There are only a few additions to these references to ‘anthropological materialism’ throughout Benjamin’s oeuvre.6 Despite such a scarce number, 2 Ibid. and The Arcades Project, convolute [W8, 1], p. 633. The romantic writer Jean Paul, the dramatist Georg Büchner, the writer Karl Gutzkow, the Swiss realist writer Gottfried Keller, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche are all present in the sequence of letters ‘German Men and Women’ (1936). These writers appear constantly in the writings of Benjamin. More specifically, Benjamin wrote an article on Keller for Die literarische Welt in 1927. Benjamin might have found in Nietzsche a decisive impulse for his peculiar metaphysics of the body. However, Benjamin does not define politics as an enhanced humanness, as in the case of Nietzsche’s superman, but rather in opposition to him. The collective body of mankind is not precisely a higher body to come, but the body of a humanity that has mirrored itself in the image of the Unmensch. See Chapter 5, on Mickey Mouse, for a further development of this comparison. 3 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [p2a,1], p. 810. 4 Ibid., convolute [U12,4], p. 591. 5 See Benjamin, ‘A Different Utopian Will’, SW3, pp. 134–135. 6 We should add another convolute to the list. In Convolute ‘a [Social Movements]’, Benjamin again associates anthropological materialism with the surrealists. In this case, he quotes Emmanuel Berl, who criticizes the surrealists’ confusion of moral nonconformism with proletarian revolution, and argues that they pretend to go back to a period in which this confusion was still possible, that is, the decades from 1820s to 1840s. Benjamin acknowledges Berl’s argument

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several authors have recently pointed out the centrality of this term in Benjamin’s philosophy. Given the absence of a proper definition, scholars who have sought to account for the significance of anthropological materialism end up referring to a letter from Adorno to Benjamin from 6 September 1936.7 In the letter, Adorno criticizes the concept and, ironically, gives further shape to its definition: For all those points in which, despite our most fundamental and concrete agreement in other matters, I differ from you could be summed up and characterized as an anthropological materialism that I cannot accept. It is as if for you the human body represents the measure of all concreteness.8

The central element of Benjamin’s anthropological materialism can consequently be summarized as the bodily concretion identified by Adorno in the letter. Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, two scholars who have stressed the relevance of this concept in Benjamin’s thought, argue that, when Adorno criticized Benjamin for developing ‘an undialectical ontology of the body’, he did not understand that Benjamin never referred ‘a-historically to the individual human body’.9 On the contrary, Benjamin’s intention was rather to theorize ‘the collective human body that has become historical’.10 For Benjamin, the individual becomes part of the collective processes of history precisely through the body. Such a body can no longer be considered as a single, atomized substance, but must rather be considered as part of a much broader physis, or nature, through which individuals become embroiled with a collective whole. In this sense, Sigrid Weigel defines anthropological materialism as ‘a theory which establishes a relation of immediacy to the material of the social or the symbolic’, a rereading of the material through the introduction of its primary matter, the body, into the political sphere.11 Gerhard Richter also adds an empirical and an epistemological function to anthropological materialism. He argues that, for Benjamin, the body acts and explains it by arguing that, then, some ideas such as the hostility towards progress and anthropological materialism—which, according to him, are refractory to Marxism—could still be emphasized (The Arcades Project, convolute [a1, 1], p. 698). 7 See Bolz and Van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, p. 55; Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies’, p. 1; Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 58; and Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 141. 8 Letter by Adorno to Benjamin, 6 September 1936 (The Complete Correspondence, p. 146; italics in the original). 9 Bolz and Van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, p. 55. 10 Ibid. 11 Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, p. 4.

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as the primary source through which we experience and apprehend the world, that is, as the ‘material substratum of cognition’.12 Benjamin had begun to write about anthropology and the human body in a series of texts from the late 1910s and early 1920s, such as ‘Perception and Body’ (1918),13 ‘On Shame’ (1919–1920),14 ‘On Love and Related Matters’ (1920),15 ‘On Blushing in Rage and Shame’ (1919–1920),16 and ‘On Horror’ (1920–1922),17 which centre around the way in which humans experience their bodies.18 In the first text, for example, Benjamin points out that, whereas we can see our feet, we cannot perceive our back, face, or head in their entirety with our own eyes: ‘We rise up into the world of perception with our feet, but not our head.’19 Léa Barbisan has referred to these texts as a ‘phenomenology of embodiment’.20 As she argues, phenomenology was the first philosophical movement to deal with bodily awareness, establishing a distinction between Leib (physical, lived body) and Körper (corporeal substance, thing-body). Benjamin’s contact with this problematic probably came from a seminar he attended in 1918 by philosopher and psychologist Paul Häberlin, although Häberlin was eventually more interested in the relationship between body and soul.21 Barbisan argues that, instead of reconciling ‘live body’ and the ego, as phenomenological philosophers such as Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl intended to do, Benjamin stresses the breach between ‘inside and outside, self and world, subject and object’.22 Whereas Scheler and Husserl conclude that we might perceive our body both as a thing and as a part of ourselves, and therefore the physical and lived body are, in the end, the same entity, Benjamin accentuates the uncanny split between Leib and Körper. In so doing, Benjamin breaks with the natural-scientific conception of the body as an organism. According to Barbisan, Benjamin, in this way, attempted 12 Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 58. 13 Benjamin, ‘Wahrnehmung und Leib’, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, pp. 67–68. 14 Benjamin, ‘Über die Scham’, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 70. 15 Benjamin, ‘On Love and Related Matters’, SW1, pp. 229–230. 16 Benjamin, ‘Über Erröten in Zorn und Scham’, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 120. 17 Benjamin, ‘Über das Grauen’, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 76. 18 For a translation of ‘On Shame’ and ‘On Blushing in Rage and Shame’ into English, as well as a commentary on these and other texts, especially on colour, see Bard-Rosenberg, ‘Walter Benjamin on Blushing’. 19 Benjamin, ‘Wahrnehmung und Leib’, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 67, quoted in Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 61. 20 Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies’, p. 2. 21 See Steiner, ‘The True Politician’, pp. 55–58. For a more detailed account of the influence of Häberlin on Benjamin, see Steiner, ‘Von Bern nach Muri. Vier unveröffentlichte Briefe Walter Benjamins an Paul Häberlin im Kontext’. 22 Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies’, p. 3.

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to defy the existing reactionary organicism in the Weimar Republic that wanted to create a coherent political community based on the body as a substratum of identity. Benjamin, by contrast, thought of the body as elusive, never fully belonging to the self. In this way, the historically formed social body was not a depositary of an ego or an identity, but rather ‘a constantly mutating whole’.23 This distinction is further clarified in a text written in 1922 or 1923 entitled ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’. In this article, Benjamin introduces a decisive argument about the relationship between technology and the human body. Although the essay begins with a discussion of the polarity between Geist and Leib, Benjamin soon renders this irrelevant, given he eventually names them as one and the same thing. Benjamin then proceeds to discuss the two modes of embodiment for which a distinction is pertinent: Leib and Körper. For him, as well as for Häberlin, Leib and Körper place the human being in different universal contexts. Leib is, according to Benjamin, ‘[e]verything that a human being can distinguish in himself as having his form as a totality, as well as such of his limbs and organs that appear to have a form.’24 As such, the limitations that human beings sensuously perceive in themselves are part of their body, their Leib. The perception of the corporeal substance (Körper), on the contrary, is sensed through pain or pleasure and, as such, claims Benjamin, no limitation is perceived. As a result, the body (Leib) is always entwined with the body’s form and, consequently, the role of the senses is to place such a body in relation to the external. Corporeal substance (Körper), by contrast, does not take a concrete form. Within this understanding, Körper represents a human relation to God, whereas Leib delivers humans to a conception of mankind. Hence, through the body (Leib), the individual presents itself historically and, thereby, the individual body expands to humankind. Through this discussion of the psychophysical problem, Benjamin is able to connect the experience of the individual body to the collective, and therefore to politics.25 As he expands upon further in a footnote in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, individual and collective should not be conceived as binary oppositions.26 Humanity is, for him, inscribed with individuality, which is 23 Ibid., p. 5. 24 Benjamin, ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, SW1, p. 394. 25 See Steiner, ‘The True Politician’, p. 81. 26 I refer to Benjamin’s famous footnote about the masses and class-consciousness. In fact, Barbisan’s argument about the collective body as an elusive and mutating whole sheds light on this point. In this footnote, we read: ‘In the solidarity of the proletarian class struggle, the dead, undialectical opposition between individual and mass is abolished; for the comrade,

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nevertheless differentiated from the ‘single embodied individuals’.27 Leib, therefore, determines the experience of the human being in historical time and interweaves individual lives with collective historical processes.28 It is precisely in this discussion of Leib and Körper, in the third section of the essay, ‘Body and Corporeal Substance’, that Benjamin introduces technology as a medium by which the individual expands to the collective. In one of his first references to the collective body (Kollektivleib), Benjamin notes: In addition to the totality of all its living members, humanity is able partly to draw nature, the nonliving, plant, and animal, into this life of the body of mankind, and thereby into this annihilation and fulfillment. It can do this by virtue of the technology in which the unity of its life is formed. Ultimately, everything that subserves humanity’s happiness may be counted part of its life, its limbs.29

In this fragment, Benjamin suggests that this collective body is not only formed by human beings, but also by objects and living beings around them. More significantly, it is technology that unites humans and nonhumans into this collective body. If one pays close attention to the way in which Benjamin articulates the role of technology, it is clear that technology is conceived as a space in which the collective body is constructed. Technology is therefore not a means, as it is commonly understood, but—as I will later develop—a medium. This point becomes clearer when Benjamin expands his argument in subsequent texts regarding the collective body and its organization in technology. In those texts, technology is referred to as the medium in which humans organize their lives with regard to nature and other human beings. Benjamin ends the passage quoted above with the notion that everything that completes humanity’s happiness should be considered as part of this bodily life, as its organs. The struggle for happiness does not appear, therefore, as an individual task, but rather as the task of the individual as part of humanity. Uwe Steiner has suggested that the distinction between Körper and Leib corresponds to the division established in the ‘Theological-Political it does not exist. Decisive as the masses are for the revolutionary leader, therefore, his great achievement lies not in drawing the masses after him, but in constantly incorporating himself into the masses, in order to be, for them, always one among hundreds of thousands’ (‘Work of Art’ [second version], SW3, n129–130). 27 Benjamin, ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, SW1, p. 395. 28 Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies’, p. 4. 29 Benjamin, ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, SW1, p. 395.

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Fragment’ between the messianic or transcendent order and the profane order of history. In that essay, Benjamin writes that ‘[t]he secular order should be erected on the idea of happiness.’30 As Benjamin ties politics to the profane order, happiness appears as its telos, as its political goal, which must therefore be sought in history.31 Similarly, in ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, the happiness of bodily life appears as a possibility that can be reached in technology.32 Technology, therefore, bears within itself a promise of happiness. It is for this reason that in ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (1930), technology is presented as ‘a key to happiness’, even if the argument goes underdeveloped.33 It is worth noting that Benjamin always understands medium—whether he refers to language, images, or technology—in terms of its non-instrumentality. As Samuel Weber has pointed out, medium in Benjamin is neither a means to an end nor an end in itself. Benjamin characterizes this nature with two words that resemble phonetically in German: unmitteilbar (immediate) and unmittelbar (impartable), which can be defined by its quality ‘not to become something entirely different but also not to stay simply the same’.34 Medium is thus constituted by its virtuality, by its constitutive alterability.35 Jan Sieber, borrowing a concept from ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), has described this mediating practice as ‘pure means’.36 As with other concepts in his philosophy, Benjamin thinks of technology as a sphere that mediates between the profane and the divine poles, a sphere in—and not through—which these two poles 30 Benjamin, ‘Theological-Political Fragment’, SW3, p. 305. 31 In ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, Adorno recognizes that the desire for happiness that Benjamin had def ined as the basic motif of Marcel Proust was also the main quality of his thought. Thus, Adorno argues that, for Benjamin, the promise of happiness, which was usually reserved for art, could be fulfilled within the site of knowledge (Adorno, Prisms, p. 230). 32 Steiner argues that, in ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, technology functions as a means to an end, that is, the happiness of bodily life. However, as I point out, the idea of medium being understood in Benjamin as a means is problematic. Rather than a means, technology could be conceived of as the medium or space in which happiness can be attained. Nevertheless, Steiner is right to point out that, in technology, happiness is the political telos. For this reason, he argues that it should be placed at the centre of Benjamin’s reflections on politics (‘The True Politician’, p. 52). Jan Sieber agrees that Technik is, in Benjamin, the medium in which humanity seeks happiness as its end. However, in his reading of Technik as pure means, based on its non-instrumentality, he argues that happiness is Technik’s a-telos politics, nuancing therefore the problematical idea of technology as a means to an end (Sieber, ‘Técnica’, p. 209). 33 Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, SW2, p. 321. I will return to this text in Chapter 3, on German film, in order to understand the reception of technology in Germany. 34 Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities, p. 44. 35 Ibid., p. 42. 36 See Sieber, ‘Technique as a Pure Means’.

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relate immediately to each other. Technology is, therefore, the pure means of this relation that mediates—non-instrumentally—between humans and nature in history.

Collective Body Benjamin offers a more overt definition of technology in ‘To the Planetarium’, the last section of his book of aphorisms One Way Street (1928), in which he outlines the creation of a collective body in technology.37 The metaphysical conception of technology in ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’ is displaced here by a more anthropological articulation. Nevertheless, the conception remains ambiguous and the passage remains a puzzle, particularly because Benjamin conceives the creation of a collective body as a sexual intercourse between human beings and the cosmos. It should be borne in mind that this strange articulation comes from two decisive influences: Florens Christian Rang in Deutsche Bauhütte (1924)38 and the problematic work of Ludwig Klages, especially in On Cosmogonic Eros (1922),39 but also in ‘Man and Earth’. Klages wrote this latter text to be delivered in the first congress of the German Youth Movement in 1913—which Benjamin attended—in which Klages similarly referred to humanity’s rape of nature through technology. 40 At the beginning of ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin 37 Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, SW4, pp. 486–487. 38 Steiner has brought attention to the influence of Deutsche Bauhütte, a text written by Florens Christian Rang, a highly esteemed and respected friend of Benjamin, on the section ‘To the Planetarium’. Rang’s text is a memorandum about current political events—namely the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr district in 1923—which contains a political philosophy of technology that might have had a significant influence on Benjamin’s thought on the matter. There, Rang claims that, with technology, things may accommodate humans. Technology can likewise free humans from the enslavement implied by the human exploitation of nature. However, Rang laments, as Benjamin later does, that, while technology is used for capitalist purposes in the name of property and nations, nature will obey humans only by force. The correct use of technology, though, depends for Rang on the technician’s conscience rather than the class struggle, as for Benjamin. Furthermore, Rang links this act of conscience as a step towards the realm of God, ‘a transcendently guaranteed correspondence between the individual revolution of conscience and the technological mobilization’. Benjamin, by contrast, places the mobilization of technology by the political subject—conceived of as collective—in the realm of the profane, as I have mentioned above (Steiner, ‘The True Politician’, pp. 73–75). 39 For the influence of Ludwing Klages on ‘To the Planetarium’, see Wohlfarth, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros’; Charles, ‘Secret Signals from Another World’, pp. 52–68; and Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 144. 40 Charles, ‘Secret Signals from Another World’, p. 54.

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claims that the communal absorption in a cosmic experience was a familiar form of experience (Erfahrung) for the ancients. Modern man has lost that ability because, like the modern astronomers, emphasis is placed on the optical connection to the universe. For Benjamin, the ecstatic trance (Rausch) through which ancient peoples had intercourse with the cosmos was brought about by an experience in which the knowledge of near and remote has been interpenetrated by one another. Benjamin adopts Klages’ ideas about cosmic experience, the eroticism of nearness and distance, and Rausch, which will also form the basis of the receptive side of Benjamin’s concept of innervation. Benjamin also anticipates the ‘mimetic faculty’, the human gift for producing similarities, a concept that he will expand and develop in the homonymous essay from 1933. In that text, he contends that ancient people were able to draw magical correspondences and analogies in the cosmos and could thus imitate the sky through dances and other cultic rites. Over centuries, Benjamin argues, the mimetic faculty has undergone transformations and, for the modern man, language, and especially script, has become the highest level of mimetic behaviour and a repository of non-sensuous similarity. 41 Through this argument, Benjamin wanted to stress that this experience of finding mimetic similarities in the cosmos was communal, approached with all the body—or, rather, through a bodily presence of mind—and, finally, that this experience produced an empowering excitement through that communal body. For this reason, he laments that the relation of modern man to the cosmos has been reduced to the individual contemplation of starry nights, that is, to an individual experience that approaches the cosmos through the sense of sight alone. Benjamin thought, nevertheless, that modern technology opened up a collective relation to the cosmos once again. In ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin advances an argument about new technologies creating the possibility of a communal experience. The dichotomy between the modern individual stargazer opposed to a communal absorption of cosmic experience prefigures that of the individual contemplation of painting as opposed to the collective reception of film in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. The latter introduces the possibility of organizing, through film’s technological nature, a collective body, exposing the audience to a technology that does not embody an instrumentalist logic. In ‘To the Planetarium’, however, Benjamin names the First World War as one such attempt to create a communal experience. Through war, suggests Benjamin, humanity sought to merge with cosmic powers, to enact on a planetary scale, in the spirit of 41 Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, SW2, pp. 720–722.

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technology, a wooing of the cosmos. Benjamin understands, therefore, that a new, collective body would emerge as the fruit of the procreation between humanity and the cosmos in technology. 42 Irving Wohlfarth has correctly pointed out some perturbing aspects of this argument, not least Benjamin’s masculinist tone. 43 Benjamin understands the procreation of this collective body according to the sexual drive of mankind. As such, the First World War is seen ‘as the terrible perversion of an irrepressible need’. 44 It seems as if, at that time, war was the only access to the correct relationship between humanity and the cosmos—read also nature—in the medium of technology. Even more problematic is that Benjamin reads the First World War as a rape of Mother Earth; a failed encounter, and therefore a failed attempt to organize a collective physis on a planetary scale, but an encounter nonetheless, which contained furthermore the ‘secret assignation’ to produce a collective body. 45 In this fragment, Benjamin is less critical of the deployment of technology in war as he will be in ‘Theories of German Fascism’ and the ‘Work of Art’ essay. The communal Rausch that he calls for could be found in the ecstasy of destruction in war that he criticized a few years later in the works of Ernst Jünger and Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. Furthermore, as Wohlfarth notes, Benjamin calls Erfahrung here what he will later criticize as Erlebnis, and more specifically Fronterlebnis, as a devaluation of true experience, in essays such as ‘Theories of German Fascism’, ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), and ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ (1936). 46 Ultimately, in ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin goes on to question the use of technology deployed in war. He laments that the most widespread understanding of technology is the imperialist-capitalist conception by which humans use technology to master nature. Benjamin compares such a conception with a teacher who threatens his pupils with a cane, that is, with those who proclaim that the purpose of education is the mastery of children by adults. For Benjamin, on the contrary, education should be 42 With this sexually charged language, Benjamin resembles one of the theoretical sources for his anthropological materialism, Fourier, who claimed that planets have two souls and two sexes and can copulate; therefore, they are also reproducible. According to Fourier, planets can copulate, first, with themselves, because the north pole is male and spreads a boreal fluid and the south pole is female and spreads the southern fluid; second, with other planets, by means of emissions from opposite poles; and, finally, through an intermediary (Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, p. 45). 43 Wohlfarth, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros’, p. 78. 44 Ibid., p. 82. 45 Ibid., p. 83. 46 Ibid., p. 81.

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the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and, therefore, mastery should be over this relationship and not of one generation over the other. Technology should be understood in similar terms: as the mastery of the relation between humanity and nature. In short, this second mastery (Beherrschung) is, in opposition to the first (Naturbeherrschung), a non-instrumental mediation. In this, Benjamin proposes a less hierarchical relationship to nature, a relation of interplay (Zusammenspiel). Benjamin believed that, if humanity would establish this relationship, technology would repay humanity by exploding all the potentials that lie within itself. The ruling classes, however, have followed the imperialist conception of technology and, because of their lust for profit, have betrayed its positive potentials. It is for this reason, Benjamin says, that technology took revenge and ‘turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath’. 47 In other words, the First World War took place, or at least became so bloodthirsty, as a result of the misuse of technology made by the leading powers. Resuming the argument introduced in ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, Benjamin argues that technology is organizing a new physis, or collective body for humankind. This social organization, he claims, is different from previous configurations of humanity, which were primarily based on dominant social structures of organic life such as families and nations. Benjamin’s references to, and quotes from, Claire Démar in The Arcades Project—in which she argued for a different social regulation of the body—find here their true meaning. For Benjamin, the adaptation of technology into the collective body of humankind will break the allegedly organic conception of the family. Following his own radical anthropology, Benjamin suggests that, while humans as a species completed their development thousands of years ago, the ‘species mankind’ is in its initial stages and has to adapt to the new nature. This collective body, says Benjamin, would not only incorporate ‘that tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call “Nature”’, 48 that is, what exists without the agency of humankind. As he had already introduced in ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, this collective body would also assimilate objects, the nature worked through by humans—what he will later call ‘second nature’—which would ultimately become humanity’s own nature. 49 With this argument, Benjamin stresses the political importance of using technology as the medium through which the relation between human 47 Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, SW1, p. 487. 48 Ibid., p. 487. 49 I will discuss the Hegelian-Lukácsian term ‘second nature’ in depth below.

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beings and nature would enter an interplay, abandoning hierarchical relations, since the mastery of the former over the latter end up leading to human annihilation. This is precisely the point of an earlier section from One Way Street entitled ‘Fire Alarm’. In ‘Fire Alarm’, Benjamin argues that the current technological and economic development is leading humankind to a catastrophe and calls for its interruption: if the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not completed by an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a moment signalled by inflation and poison-gas warfare), all is lost. Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be cut.50

The economic situation of contemporary Germany, with its high rates of unemployment and economic inflation, and the use of poison-gas warfare in the First World War are the symptoms of the catastrophic ‘end of three thousand years of cultural development’.51 Progress—as the cultural development led by the bourgeoisie, in which Benjamin also includes science and technology—is conceived here as catastrophe. For that reason, he claims that an emergency intervention must be performed or everything will be lost. If technology keeps being (mis)used, catastrophe will progress on. Benjamin returns to the relationship between war and the creation of a collective body again in ‘Theories of German Fascism’ and in the ‘Work of Art’. In the first text, Benjamin accuses German society of not being mature enough to make technology its organ and suggests that the war to come will be ‘a slave revolt on the part of technology’.52 In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin repeats the same idea and claims that war is the erroneous direction taken by technology when its development towards a better relationship among humans is impeded by the property system.53 Despite such a bleak scenario, Benjamin believed that the new collective physis organized by technology could still be rescued. At the end of ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin conceives the revolts which followed the war—he was probably referring to the Soviet Revolution and the 1919 Spartacist uprising in Germany—as attempts on the part of the proletariat to bring this new body under control. ‘To the Planetarium’ was also influenced by another writer, the German science-fiction writer Paul Scheerbart, especially his utopian novel 50 51 52 53

Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, SW1, p. 470. Ibid., p. 469. Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, SW2, p. 312. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 121.

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Lesabéndio (1913).54 Scheerbart placed himself at the centre of Benjamin’s political and anthropological concerns as a result of his depiction of a successful interaction between technology and humanity. Benjamin was planning to write an extensive work on politics, which would have as its concluding section a philosophical critique of the novel Lesabéndio, although this project never came to fruition.55 Benjamin attributed Scheerbart’s work with political relevance because he created an image—totally otherworldly to his contemporaries—in which humanity ‘had deployed the full range of its technology and put it to humane use’.56 To reach this state of affairs, two demands were essential: ‘first, people should discard the base and primitive belief that their task was to “exploit” the forces of nature; second, they should be true to the conviction that technology, by liberating human beings, would fraternally liberate the whole of creation.’57 This brief commentary, probably written in the last months of Benjamin’s life, perfectly encapsulates his conception of technology. Firstly, technology must not be used as a means to master nature. Once this precept is understood, technology can be developed in order to improve human life. If technology is deployed for humane purposes, technology will not only be beneficial for human beings, but also for nature and the whole of the cosmos. In Lesabéndio, for example, technology and nature do not appear as mutually opposed. As Christina Svendsen argues, the inhabitants of the planet Pallas ‘are not alienated because they do not make the faulty distinction between technology and nature’ or ‘draw a rigid dichotomy between technology and themselves, or themselves and the natural world around them’.58 Technology, as they use it, transforms them and the whole cosmic environment in which they live, without imposing hierarchies or relations of exploitation. For that reason, Benjamin characterizes the asteroid in which the novel Lesabéndio is set 54 Benjamin acquired this book as a present from Gerhard Scholem on the occasion of his wedding with Dora on 17 April 1917. 55 This project, which was never brought to fruition as it was planned, was to be divided into three parts. The first part would be called ‘The True Politician’. The second part would be entitled ‘True Politics’, with two different chapters (one of them being ‘Critique of Violence’ and the other ‘Teleology without a Final Purpose’). The third, concluding section would be the review of the novel Lesabéndio. This last part would also include a critique of Ernst Bloch, possibly with references from Salomo Friedlaender’s review of Spirit of Utopia. Although, from this project, only the text ‘Critique of Violence’ remains, we can assess from this plan the weight of Scheerbart’s ideas in Benjamin’s conception of politics. For further reading about this project, see Steiner, ‘The True Politician’. 56 Benjamin, ‘On Scheerbart’, SW4, p. 386. 57 Ibid. 58 Svendsen, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, p. ix.

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as ‘the best of all worlds’.59 In the best tradition of his anthropological materialism, Benjamin characterizes Scheerbart’s ideas with a utopia of the body in which ‘the Earth forms a single body together with humankind’.60 No doubt such an image influenced Benjamin’s understanding of the procreation between humanity and the cosmos and the birth of a new collective body. As Benjamin said, Scheerbart seems ‘never to forget that the earth is a heavenly body’.61

Innervation The idea of the collective body reappears in the ‘Surrealism’ essay, in which Benjamin argues that technology functions as a medium in which this body is in a process of formation. Benjamin states there that ‘[t]he collective is a body, too’ and that this physis ‘is being organized for it in technology’.62 The stimulus that organizes this collective body comes from a different constellation, no longer from the ecstasy of war, but from a collision between images and body, detectable in the practice of the surrealists. As I will develop later, this source of energy, in the image of an interpenetration of body and image, becomes the basis for his argument that the collective body is formed in the arena of film spectatorship. In the ‘Surrealism’ essay, Benjamin articulates for the first time the idea of the creation of a collective body through the concept of innervation, a word that bears clear physiological connotations. With this term, also deployed in other texts from these years, Benjamin refers to the capacity of technology to provide both a source of energy and also the nerves through which that energy is innervated, as a prerequisite for the formation of a collective body. Technology thus helps bring this collective body together, connecting—as if it were the nerves—the individual to a collective physis. Technology not only becomes the medium in which this body is organized, and the nerves that electrify the body, but also its organs. 59 Benjamin wrote to Gerhard Scholem, in a letter dated 23 November 1919, that he had written the prolegomena to a second critique of Lesabéndio in Lugano (which must be the essay to which Benjamin referred to as ‘The True Politician’—the essay was written but has been lost) and that he wanted to begin a longer essay in which he ‘intended to prove that Pallas is the best of all worlds’ (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 151). 60 This passage is from an unpublished review of Scheerbart’s story Münchhausen und Clarissa (Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 148; cited in Steiner, ‘The True Politician’, p. 75). 61 Benjamin, ‘On Scheerbart’, SW4, p. 387. 62 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, SW2, p. 217.

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The concept of ‘innervation’ is now recognized as a central theme in Benjamin’s oeuvre, but the concept did not receive critical attention until a late stage in Benjaminian scholarship. Susan Buck-Morss in ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’ (1992) and Miriam Hansen in ‘Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney’ (1993) were the first scholars to place this concept at the centre of Benjamin’s writings on media.63 But it was the latter who devoted a whole article about the concept of ‘innervation’, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’ (1999), providing a clearer portrait of this concept in Benjamin. Hansen introduces the concept broadly as ‘a neurophysiological process that mediates between internal and external, psychic and motoric, human and mechanical registers’.64 She argues that Benjamin might have borrowed the concept from the physiological discourses of the time, most probably from Sigmund Freud. The latter influence is clear in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1940), in which Benjamin directly cites him. For Freud, the term designated a transmission or rush of energy through the nervous system, that is, through the anatomical distribution of nerves in an organism or bodily region, implying a process of discharge. In his discussion of hysteria, Freud gives the concept another meaning, referring to innervation as ‘the transformation of an unbearable, incompatible psychic excitation into “something somatic”’.65 Hansen claims that, whereas for Freud and for physiologists, innervation is in any case always a unidirectional transfer of energy from the psychic to the somatic, for Benjamin, innervation was ‘a two-way process, that is, not only a conversion of mental, affective energy into somatic, motoric form, but also the possibility of reconverting, and recovering, split-off psychic energy through motoric stimulation’.66 This process does not correspond to a protective shield against external stimuli, but as a medium or porous interface between the organism and the world established through a bidirectional exchange of psychic energies. 63 Buck-Morss gave a tentative definition of the concept in her essay: ‘“Innervation” is Benjamin’s term for a mimetic reception of the external world, one that is empowering, in contrast to a defensive mimetic adaptation that protects at the price of paralyzing the organism, robbing it of its capacity of imagination, and therefore of active response’ (Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, n17). Miriam Hansen argued that technical media such as film and radio acted as the central arenas for the concept of innervation that Benjamin had introduced [sic] in the ‘Surrealism’ essay. She also read Benjamin’s writings about Mickey Mouse through this concept, arguing that, for Benjamin, these films anticipated ‘an emancipatory incorporation of technology’ (Hansen, ‘Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney’, pp. 38 and 42). 64 Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, p. 313. 65 Ibid., p. 316. 66 Ibid., p. 317.

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More recently, Matthew Charles has suggested, in his article ‘Secret Signals from Another World: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Innervation’, other possible influences on the concept. First, he argues that Benjamin was particularly critical of the ‘subjective psychology’ of Freudian psychoanalysis, especially in his early writings.67 In fact, by the time Benjamin started to use Freudian theory, the concept had already undergone various guises. For Charles, a decisive influence was the Soviet discourses about biorhythmics and biomechanics, as developed by such writers as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei M. Eisenstein, and Sergei Tretyakov. Benjamin probably became acquainted with these ideas not directly, but through Asja Lācis, whom he met in 1924. On Lācis’s theatrical practice with children, Benjamin wrote, at some time between 1928 and 1929, ‘The Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’, an essay that uses the concept of innervation. Charles argues that the dualistic structure of tension (Spannung) and release (Erlösung) introduced in this essay—found in the relationship between the workshop’s educational work and the performance—derives from biomechanical theory. In the text, Benjamin champions theatre as a medium of education, for, in that space, reality and play coincide.68 Theatre is a particularly revolutionary medium, argues Benjamin, because it ‘will unleash in children the most powerful energies of the future’.69 These energies are discharged, he notes, with the neutralization of the ‘moral personality’ of the leader, that is, the instructor or teacher, who should only exert an indirect influence on the children, mediated by their tasks, the play’s content, and the performance. According to this line of thought, for pedagogical theatre to succeed, children need to form a collective in which they are both the performers and the audience, the director and the critic. For Benjamin, the children’s ‘collective radiates not just the most powerful energies, but also the most relevant ones’.70 This energy is associated with the children’s imagination, which, in this non-hierarchical medium of collective play, is transferred from a ‘magical world of sheer fantasy’ to their gestures and actions.71 The release of energies, following ‘a signal from another world, in which the child lives 67 Charles, ‘Secret Signals from Another World’, p. 40. 68 Benjamin contrasts the proletarian children’s theatre with bourgeois education, which ‘requires an idea toward which education leads’. In other words, bourgeois education is instrumental, whereas ‘[p]roletarian education needs first and foremost a framework, an objective space within which education can be located’ (‘The Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’, SW2, p. 202; my emphasis). 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., p. 203. 71 Ibid., p. 204.

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and commands’, is applied to the theatre’s material, which is primarily the children’s performances.72 In this instant, Benjamin names innervation as discharge precisely through corporeal movements. As an example, he defines a painter as ‘a man who sees more accurately with his hand when his eye fails him, who is able to transfer the receptive innervation of the eye muscles into the creative innervation of the hand’.73 He then compares the painter’s ability with the gestures of children in the proletarian theatre: ‘What characterizes every child’s gesture is that creative innervation is exactly proportioned to receptive innervation.’74 Innervations in this proletarian children’s theatre are associated with the ‘wild liberation of the child’s imagination’ that takes place during the performance.75 The power of the child’s gesture is to make that ‘secret signal’ speak—a signal which not only originates from ‘a world of sheer fantasy’ but also from ‘what is to come’.76 Matthew Charles argues that innervation’s two-way process, that which Miriam Hansen sought to find in psychoanalysis, can be found in the gestures of the child, where there is a ‘balanced transference between the “receptive innervation” of the perceptual organs and the “creative innervation” of the motor organs’.77 Based on his experience in the Proletkult Theatre, Eisenstein developed, in ‘The Montage of Attractions’ (1923) and later in ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’ (1924), a similar theory in which the actors’s movements were aimed to produce an equivalent agitation in the spectators: ‘the whole process of the actor’s movement is organised with the aim of facilitating the imitative capacities of the audience’.78 In contrast with psychological absorption, the montage of attractions aimed to produce shocks in the spectator: ‘a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience’.79 The actor stages a ‘productive tension’, which becomes a releasing exercise for the audience. Spectators develop an emotion through their unused muscular energy, which is eventually collectively discharged.80 Eisenstein introduces the concept of innervation in his ‘montage of attractions’. However, although the whole idea of attractions is similar to Benjamin’s conception, the term ‘innervation’ only appears in a negative sense as an unwanted muscular 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., p. 205. 76 Ibid, pp. 205–206. 77 Charles, ‘Secret Signals from Another World’, p. 47. 78 Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’, in Selected Works, I, p. 50. 79 Ibid., 39; and ‘The Montage of Attractions’, in Selected Works, I, p. 34. 80 See Charles, ‘Secret Signals from Another World’, p. 48.

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spasm.81 Through the double movement of tension and release, as developed by Benjamin in his text on proletarian children’s theatre, it is easier to understand the articulation that the concept takes in Benjamin’s writings on film, in which the audience both receives energy coming from the screen and releases the negative energy accumulated during the working day as a moment of therapeutic relief. The state of distraction that Benjamin associates with cinematic spectatorship, when the intellect and the muscles are in relaxation, is particularly productive in the activation of deeper layers of the unconscious that, with the help of their own perceptions, trigger the audience’s imagination.82 The notion of innervation appears for the first time in One Way Street (1928), a work that precedes ‘The Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’ but not Benjamin’s acquaintance with Lācis. In One Way Street, he compares the typewriter with a fountain pen: The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.83 81 Innervation is mentioned twice in ‘The Montage of Attractions’, in both cases associated to spasmodic impulses, in contrast to a more organized motor response: ‘In rhythmic movement we are a long way from being able to behave as we please: the actual biomechanical structure of the working organ inevitably conducts our movement towards a regular function that breaks down into the sum of simply and strictly motivated harmonic components. The role of random innervation in this process amounts to a spasmodic disturbing intervention in the organically progressing motor process and the possibility of automating this process […] is in these circumstances excluded’ (pp. 54–55; my emphasis). And, talking about the performer of a jazz band: ‘his command of movement consists in an amazing use of the process of neutralising the inertia of a large-scale movement into a series of pantomime and percussive movements, and in their combination with small-scale new elements of movement. If this process is replaced by a process of newly emerging innervations of certain limbs (if the jazz-player is not a good dancer), without regard for the rhythmic oscillations of the body as a whole, his exaggerated movements, ceasing to fit into an organic schema, would have the effect of pathological grimaces’ (p. 55; my emphasis). 82 A relaxed audience is also a prerequisite for Brecht’s epic theatre, as Benjamin makes clear in the first section of ‘What Is the Epic Theater? (II)’, SW4, p. 302. 83 Benjamin, ‘One Way Street’, SW1, p. 457. Benjamin probably based this idea on a passage from Lesabéndio in which Scheerbart writes about the potential of the inhabitants of the asteroid Pallas to develop fountain pens out of their fingers: ‘Most of the work done here would have been impossible if the Pallasians did not each have many different hands, some coarse and some sensitive and fine. The more delicate hands also had fingers that the Pallasians could use to write, without any other equipment, just as if they were fountain pens’ (Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, p. 37).

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The argument in this fragment is similar to that of the painter mentioned above. The writer will transfer their ideas to the book better if they do not depend on the flexibility of the hands. This can be directly introduced through innervations from the head to the hand. Significantly, Benjamin refers here to the power of new technologies to facilitate this transfer from ‘receptive innervation’ to ‘creative innervation’. He is, in fact, calling for a prosthesis of the human body in the form of a technology more advanced than the typewriter, a theme which has later become very popular, especially after Marshall McLuhan. According to Miriam Hansen, Benjamin here ‘anticipates ways in which contemporary technologies both interface with the bodily sensorium and extend it into and through the apparatus’.84 The concept appears again in another subsection of One Way Street entitled ‘Prayer Wheel’: ‘Only images in the mind vitalize the will. […] There is no intact will without exact pictorial imagination. No imagination without innervation.’85 Breathing in yoga is, for Benjamin, a regulator of this innervation, since every breath is coordinated with ‘the holy syllables’, with something remote and unapproachable. Imagination is, therefore, connected in a two-way process with physiological responses: The mind stimulates the body, but the movement of the body can also trigger the imagination. In these two cases, however, innervation is analysed through the individual. From the ‘Surrealism’ essay onwards, Benjamin will stand the concept of innervation on its head: to signal a collective process of stimulation which facilitates a process of technological adaptation. In ‘Surrealism’, Benjamin finds such innervation in the praxis of the surrealists. He claims that the ‘energies of intoxication’ supplied by surrealism can channel a revolutionary discharge through the bodily innervations of the collective. From the beginning of the essay, Benjamin argues that intellectual currents—such as surrealism—can generate a sufficient ‘head of water’ to run a power station.86 Although Benjamin begins with an image of a critic, a German observer who can take advantage of this electric current, it is eventually the collective body that is supplied with this power in the form of an electric innervation. Benjamin thought that, in the practice of the surrealists, images form contact with a body that, through a collision, could empower the collective. In order to theorize this new artistic organization, Benjamin developed the concepts ‘image-space’ (Bildraum) and ‘body-space’ (Leibraum). The surrealists, he argued, had succeeded in bringing together 84 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 151. 85 Benjamin, ‘One Way Street’, SW1, p. 466. 86 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, SW2, p. 207.

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image- and body-space, challenging the traditional conception of art, and its reception in contemplation that began ‘at a distance of two meters from the body’.87 The surrealists chose the space of this collision between image- and body-space—‘one hundred percent image-space’88—as the site for their political and artistic action, because this collision could supply the necessary energies to innervate and empower the collective body in a revolutionary way: The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, be produced only in that image space to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto.89

Similarly to the text on children’s theatre, innervation is formed and embodied in a two-way movement of tension and release. The current of energy that triggers this innervation is the interpenetration of body- and image-space. In this fragment, however, Benjamin seems to suggest that the space in which body and image come together, the medium in which they collide and generate a discharge of energy, is technology—albeit such a conception of technology/technique (Technik) should be broad enough to include surrealist art and its reception. As Benjamin introduces in this essay and expands on in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, avant-garde movements such as surrealism and Dadaism have completely reduced the space between the artwork and the audience. As a consequence, the reception in a mode of contemplation, where the artwork is mainly apprehended through the sense of sight, has given way to a perception with all the body, involving the whole human sensorium. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin argues that Dadaism (and by proxy other avant-garde strands) ‘attempted to produce with the means of painting (or literature) the effects which the public today seeks in film’.90 In other words, film naturally produces the effects that other arts attempt to produce artificially. For Benjamin, it was, above all, film and 87 88 89 90

Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism’, SW2, pp. 4–5. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, SW2, p. 217. Ibid., pp. 217–218. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 118; italics in the original.

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advertisement, the primarily contemporary phenomena—as he writes in ‘This Space for Rent’ in One Way Street—that managed to tear ‘down the stage upon which contemplation moved’.91 In cinemas, there is a similar abolition of the space between images and spectators and, therefore, also an interpenetration between body- and image-space that can empower a collective innervation. Indeed, as an imminently technological art that predisposes a collective reception, film becomes particularly well suited in the creation and empowerment of a collective body. The ‘Surrealism’ essay introduces the first analogy of political revolutions with innervation. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin returns to this analogy and defines revolutions as innervations of the collective—or, more precisely, efforts at innervation on the part of the new, historically unique collective which has its organs in the new technology. […] Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach.92

Through the child, innervation is the product of a motor-perceptual miscognition within the field of the imaginary. Although the child is not able to grasp the moon, this movement sparks creative and transformative energies.93 Similarly, in politics, the collective can also be empowered in its enterprise of reaching what is beyond the imaginable. In this image, technology appears not only as the medium in which the collective body is being formed, it also becomes part of the body, following and feeding back the collective imagination. Although the concept of ‘innervation’ has received renewed attention, the physiological implications of the term have not been emphasized enough. Benjamin clearly adopts this concept for the development of his ‘anthropological materialism’ and for his idea of the organization of a collective body. Drawing on Klages’ ideas around cosmic experience, Benjamin adapts the idea to a more physiological argument in which humans can bring the remote as close as their own bodies through the mimetic faculty. In this way, images can be integrated into the somatic, and the body becomes imbued with the Rausch of this collision between remoteness and nearness. The word ‘innervation’ also relates to 91 Benjamin, ‘One Way Street’, SW1, p. 476. 92 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n124. 93 See Hansen, ‘Cinema, Not a One-Way Street’, p. 324; and Cinema and Experience, pp. 192–194.

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nerves and, more specifically, to a rush of energy channelled through the nervous system. Benjamin might assign this collective body with nerves, but they do not precede their own creation and hence their existence. It is precisely the discharge of energy that takes place through these nerves, as a Rausch, which draws together humans, technology, and nature. In this way, Benjamin adopts the term to highlight, on the one hand, the corporeality of the collective physis and, on the other, the energy that, according to Benjamin, is deployed by technology. This source of energy, which can be found in war, in the practice of the surrealists, and in cinemas, can thus stimulate and innervate a collective body.

Second Technology In the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin explicitly ascribes cinema with the power to create innervations in the audience and, thereby, the organization of a collective body: ‘To make the enormous technological apparatus of our time an object of human innervation—that is the historical task in whose service film finds its true meaning.’94 For Benjamin, film takes the role of embodying, in the corporeal sense of the term, those ‘secret signals from another world’, which should reveal technology’s ‘key to happiness’. Through a collision with the audience, Benjamin thought that film would spark an innervation that would bring the collective body together. In the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin elaborates upon the creation of this collective body in cinemas through the concept of ‘second technology’. This new formulation refers to—though it also expands and complicates—the first definition of technology that Benjamin developed in ‘To the Planetarium’. Technology here is classified according to its conception: either as the mythical account of technology that is the standpoint of the imperialist mastery of nature, or as a technology liberated from magic, which aims to be deployed for humane purposes. As such, ‘first technology’ represents an imperialist conception of technology; it is fused with ritual and instrumentalizes the human being. Its culmination, according to Benjamin, is in human sacrifice. The aim of this first technology—as he had already criticized in ‘To the Planetarium’—is the mastery of nature and, therefore, also of man. ‘Second technology’, on the contrary, is non-instrumental and reduces to a minimum the use of human beings. The aim of second 94 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), pp. 18–19. This is a point that appears only implicitly in the second version.

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technology is—like the first definition of technology given by Benjamin in ‘To the Planetarium’—the mastery of the relation between humanity and nature. According to Wohlfarth, this second technology, freed from the principles and logic of the f irst, ‘would no longer be a means but a medium’, to be used not as a tool to achieve a specific end but rather to become the extended body of a liberated humanity.95 Benjamin associates technologically reproducible art precisely with this second notion of technology and ascribes to film the training practice (Einübung) of this interplay (Zusammenspiel) between nature and humans: The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. The primary social function of art today is to rehearse that interplay. This applies especially to film.96

In his discussion of second technology, Benjamin defines the role of revolutions as the efforts to accelerate the adaptation of second technology to the ‘historically unique collective which has its organs in the new technology’.97 In other words, revolutions are attempts to produce a collective body that eventually gain control over it by innervating and adapting second technology through the collective. Benjamin defines second technology as ‘a system in which the mastering of elementary social forces is a precondition for playing [das Spiel] with natural forces’.98 This is f irst and foremost because second technology is based on play. Through a non-hierarchical relationship with natural forces, play aims to liberate humanity from drudgery. Benjamin develops the presence of play and semblance in film in a footnote in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. According to him, art is linked to both first and second technology. As is argued throughout the numerous versions of the essay, art has always been based on ritual. However, with the arrival of the technologies of reproduction, the ritualistic function of art has withered and only remains as a relic in some works of art. Benjamin also points out that the results of first technology are eternally valid, whereas those of second technology are wholly provisional. Second technology, in other words, is based on testing and scientific procedures, on experimentation and play. 95 Wohlfarth, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros’, p. 74. 96 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 108. 97 Ibid., n124. 98 Ibid.

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Benjamin conceived semblance (Schein) and play (Spiel) as the two aspects of art and mimesis. In a note related to the composition of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, he associates play with Schiller, while semblance is presented as a passionate interest that determined Goethe’s aesthetics.99 According to Benjamin, semblance has always been present in the magical procedures of f irst technology. Play, on the contrary, ‘is the inexhaustible reservoir of all the experimenting procedures of the second’.100 For Benjamin, film escapes from the ‘beautiful semblance’ on which previous art forms had been based. The example that Benjamin gives is the shooting of a f ilm in which an actor is frightened so that their expression might be recorded without the need to act. The expression of this actor, who is not miming such a gesture, will later be edited with other shots filmed in other places and perhaps with other methods. Benjamin makes a pun here with the words ‘play’ and ‘semblance’: mime can be said to present its subject as semblance, but also to play its subject. With the example of the actor who is recorded without their knowledge, Benjamin claims that, in film, the dimension of play is larger than that of semblance.101 The disregard for the uniqueness of the object and the discontinuous process of production also points to the decay of the element of semblance in film in favour of play. Benjamin argues, in conclusion, that ‘what is lost in the withering of semblance and the decay of aura in works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-Raum]’.102 Schiller, his most decisive influence on this concept, describes the element of play in art as ‘everything which is neither subjectively nor objectively contingent, and yet imposes no kind of constraint either from within or from without’.103 Schiller contended that, through the contemplation of beauty, the psyche finds itself in a medium between the sphere of physical necessity and the realm of law, and, because it discerns between the two, it is also removed from the constraints of both. Benjamin based second technology precisely on this play-drive in which human beings separated themselves from the dominion of nature and its physical forces: ‘The origin of the second technology lies at the point where, by an unconscious ruse, human beings first began to distance themselves from nature. It lies, in other words, in play.’104 Benjamin, however, associated play with those art forms with 99 Benjamin, ‘The Significance of Beautiful Semblance’, SW3, p. 137. 100 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n127. 101 Ibid., p.113. 102 Ibid., n127. 103 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, pp. 103–105. 104 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 107.

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which the audience had a more intense corporeal contact, rather than a more contemplative relationship. For Benjamin, film ‘manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of action [Spielraum]’.105 This Spielraum or ‘room for play’ expanded by film is associated with the capacity for experimentation opened up by second technology. In the comparison between the camera operator and the painter in the same essay, Benjamin presents the famous image of the cinematographic apparatus which enters reality as a surgical tool. Whereas the painter maintains a natural distance from reality, the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue. If the former creates a total image, the cinematographer’s image is piecemeal, ‘its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law’.106 For Benjamin, the single shot, or the direct intervention of the photographic camera, does not constitute film as art: ‘The work of art is only produced by means of montage.’107 For that reason, any individual element takes part of the whole, but does not constitute the nature of the work of art as such. According to Benjamin, ‘[f]ilm is the first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility.’108 In this way, he contrasts film to Greek sculpture, as an example of first technology. Whereas the latter is produced from a single piece, the former is assembled from a number of images and sequences. The editor has a vast array of options when assembling the images in a whole. Film, in this sense, has a great capacity for improvement. This capacity is present throughout the process of production, through montage—where there is wide room for play—until the final cut, which decides the form of the work of art. Thus, Benjamin concludes that, as a result of the Spielraum opened up by the second technology of film, the collective can set and test revolutionary and utopian demands. If revolutions are understood by Benjamin as the efforts to fuse second technology with the collective, the interaction of human beings with that technology in cinema appears as a rehearsal for a revolution that triggers the innervation of the technological organs of the collective. Building upon his argument in his essay on surrealism, Benjamin grants the same capacity to the reception of cinema: to create a collective body out of the collision between the images on-screen and the audience in cinema theatres. If, as Hansen argues, the image-space in surrealism ‘is no longer separate from the “space of the body”’ and the artwork ‘cannot 105 Ibid., p. 117. 106 Ibid., p. 116. 107 Ibid., p. 110. 108 Ibid., p. 109.

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be grasped from a position of contemplative distance characteristic of bourgeois high culture’,109 then screen images in the cinema similarly assault the spectators. Furthermore, the relation between the body of the audience and the image on the screen is no longer perceived only by optical means, but by the entire body.

Cinema as a Training Ground of the Senses In ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin describes war as the source that generates the necessary energy to produce a collective innervation. In ‘Surrealism’, the current of energy is produced by the collision of body and image in the new configurations of production and reception in avant-garde art. In texts such as ‘Experience and Poverty’ and the ‘Work of Art’ essay, the source is cinema. In these texts, Benjamin takes account of films’ receptive and creative innervations, and the interplay of tension and release experienced by the audience. In ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin describes Mickey Mouse films as ‘a dream that shows us in its realized form the simple but magnif icent existence for which the energy is lacking in reality’. 110 In the ‘Work of Art’, slapstick is added to the equation: ‘American slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies.’111 The collective laughter heard in cinemas was, for Benjamin, a therapeutic, cathartic process in which the tensions of 20th-century modernity were released. In his notes on the theory of distraction from 1935–1936, Benjamin compares the values of distraction in film with the values of catharsis in tragedy.112 For him, both should be conceived of as physiological phenomena. In the case of cinema, the audience consumes the f ilm as a body and releases the tensions and unconscious energies collectively. In this sense, Benjamin’s theory of distraction appears as a necessary counterpart to the innervation of technology by the audience in the process of film reception. Through collective laughter, Benjamin argues, the audience releases the dangerous energies flourishing in the masses as a consequence of the threats inherent to modern life. Once these energies are released, the audience experiences the ‘second technology’ of film as a charged somatic innervation. 109 Hansen, ‘Room-for-Play’, pp. 22–23. 110 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 734. 111 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 118. 112 Benjamin, ‘Theory of Distraction’, SW3, p. 141.

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The idea of cinema as a powerful yet dangerous stimulation of the nerves was a recurrent trope in German-language film criticism in the first decades of the 20th century. For example, Carl Forch, writing in 1912 for Bild und Film, argues that cinema, with its thrills (Sensationen), ‘can satisfy the hunger for nervous stimulation’ better than other arts or spectacles.113 The Austrian film critic Hermann Kienzl compared cinema with city life in an article for Der Strom, in which he argues that city dwellers are subjected to a number of impressions or shocks. As the urban dweller does not have the stamina and concentration required for intellectual absorption, Kienzl contends that they need trivial relaxation ‘in order to replenish their exhausted energies’.114 According to Kienzl, the modern city dweller enjoys film because they are ‘accustomed to nervous stimuli as the drug addict to his poison’.115 Kienzl understands film, therefore, as a part of the shocks and stimuli of modern cities, but also as a narcotic that anaestheticizes the nervous system. Years later, in 1931, the Austrian conservative Aurel Wolfram also linked cinema to the hurried lifestyle of modernity. For him, ‘the need for illusions’ and ‘the nervous restlessness of a massively accelerated speed of life’ are as present in films as they are in urban modernity.116 In both cases, he argues, the cinematic ‘whips the nerves’.117 As such, Wolfram describes cinema as ‘acrobatics of the senses’ and argues that ‘this alone brings pleasure, intoxication, and orgiastic exuberance’.118 The cinema reform movement—a middle-class movement that called for the regulation and control of cinema in order to restrain its pernicious effects over the working class—also accounted for film’s capacity for hyperstimulation of the nerves. A number of critics drew attention to the dangers of the overstimulation of emotions, produced by the rapid succession of images and the rollercoaster of emotions triggered by films’ narratives. The neurologist and psychiatrist Robert Gaupp, for example, warned that ‘the cinematograph, with its temporal concentration of events, has […] damaging and nerve-shattering effects’.119 113 Carl Forch, ‘Thrills in Film Drama and Elsewhere’, first published in Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie, 2:7 (1912–1913), pp. 164–165; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Sara Hall, p. 37. 114 Hermann Kienzl, ‘Theater and Cinematograph’, f irst published in Der Strom, 1:7 (1911), pp. 219–221; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Michael Cowan, p. 31. 115 Ibid. 116 Aurel Wolfram, ‘Cinema’, f irst published in Deutsches Volkstum, 13:8 (1931), 647–649; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Michael Cowan, p. 249. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Robert Gaupp, ‘The Dangers of the Cinema’, first published in Süddeutsche Monatschefte, 9.2:9 (1911–1912), pp. 363–366; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Eric Ames, p. 225.

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Another doctor, Naldo Felke, undertook an experiment with three different spectators to prove the extreme damage that cinema inflicted upon the eyes and the nerves, labelling cinema-going as an ‘optical torture’.120 For ‘reasons of health’, he called for imposing limitations on the film industry and suggested parents to ‘forbid their young children from making frequent and long visits to the cinema’.121 Benjamin also introduced film as a phenomenon belonging to urban modernity and, as the authors above, situated his writings on film within this debate about the overstimulation of the nervous system. He thought, however, that humans could become accustomed to cope with this hyperstimulation and that film would train them in their adaptation to these stimuli. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin compares film with ‘all forms of perception, tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in today’s machines’.122 He argues that ‘all problems of contemporary art find their definitive formulation only in connection with film’.123 As such, film shares the same form of pace and perception with machines. For Benjamin, the avant-garde might have tirelessly attempted to reproduce those rhythms and impressions, but film was ultimately the best art form to act as a ‘training ground or training device (Übungsinstrument)’ for the senses in a technology-saturated society.124 In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Benjamin argues that, in film, as in other modern technologies, perception is conditioned by shock. He acknowledges that shock experience has become the norm in big cities since the nineteenth century, where the individual is constantly confronted by shock and collision, which produce ‘nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery’.125 Benjamin compares this situation with the protagonist of Baudelaire’s poetry, ‘who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy’.126 He conceives these outer 120 Naldo Felke, ‘Cinema’s Damaging Effects on Health’, f irst published in Die Umschau: Wochenschrift über die Fortschritte in Wissenschaft und Technik, 22 March 1913, pp. 254–255; reproduced in Promise of Cinema, trans. Michael Cowan, pp. 234–235. 121 Ibid., p. 235. 122 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [K3,3], p. 394. 123 Ibid. 124 The entire convolute, in which the second word is illegible (it could be either Auswicklung or Auswirkung), says: ‘Film: unfolding [resultant?] of all forms of perception, tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in today’s machines, such that all problems of contemporary art find their definitive formulation only in connection with film’ [K3,3]. Howard Eiland has characterized this convolute as ‘what is possibly the broadest and boldest statement on film that we have today from Walter Benjamin’ (see Eiland, ‘On Benjamin’s Film Theory’). 125 Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW4, p. 328. 126 Ibid.

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stimuli and shocks as a form of energy. Benjamin inherited this argument from Freud, for whom consciousness acts as a protective shield against these shocks or ‘excessive energies’ which could have a traumatic effect. He quotes Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921): ‘The protective shield is equipped with its own store of energy operating in it against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world—effects that tend toward an equalization of potential and hence toward destruction.’127 According to Freud, the greater the shock, the more vigilant the consciousness. The consciousness protects the senses by blocking such impressions, which become isolated and immediate experiences (Erlebnisse) rather than vital experience (Erfahrung).128 Modernity’s hyperstimulation, which f ilm only accentuates, contributes to the thickening of the protective shield of consciousness, which ends up numbing the senses and its capacity to experience. For Benjamin, this principle was the cause of the ‘atrophy of experience’ in industrial-capitalist modernity. For him, experience is always paired with memory and with its own communicability, the capacity to pass experience down from generation to generation. However, in industrialcapitalist modernity, this type of communicable experience (Erfahrung), which is significantly communal, has been replaced by a multiplicity of immediate and subjective experiences (Erlebnisse).129 Susan Buck-Morss has argued that, as a consequence of the consciousness’ protective function, the cognitive function of the synaesthetic system—responsible for the correspondences between the outer and inner stimulus—becomes attenuated and is transformed into a system of anaesthetics, one that shuns experience in order to protect the body and the psyche from the shocks of modern life. Nevertheless, Benjamin ascribed to cinema the potential of restoring perception, of undoing the alienation of the corporeal sensorium of modern human beings. The goal was, then, to restore the power of human bodily senses, ‘not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them’.130 Drawing on Buck-Morss’s analysis, Miriam Hansen argues that Benjamin was particularly interested in film given it exemplified the nexus between the numbing of the sensorium and the emergence of more powerful thrills. On the one hand, film contributes to the pathologies caused by industrial capitalism, since it subjects the sensorium to yet more shocks. On the other hand, it ‘provides a medium of experience that, more effectively 127 Ibid., p. 317. 128 Ibid., p. 319. 129 Benjamin develops this argument in ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, pp. 731–736. 130 Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, p. 5.

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than the traditional arts, enables both a sensory recognition of human self-alienation and a non-destructive mimetic adaptation of technology’.131 This positive, stimulating adaptation to technology corresponds precisely to Benjamin’s own concept of innervation. This collective innervation involves an empowering mimetic reception of the external world, as opposed to, in Buck-Morss’s words, ‘a mimetic adaptation that protects at the price of paralyzing the organism, robbing it of its capacity of imagination, and therefore of active response’.132 In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Benjamin also assigns dream and recollection with the purpose of training human beings to cope with stimuli.133 Cinema, which Benjamin juxtaposes with dreams in both ‘Experience and Poverty’ and the ‘Work of Art’, is a training ground for the collective in this regard. As spectators watch film in a state of semi-distracted relaxation, they do not possess the same defensive shields as in everyday life. For Benjamin, the audience’s semi-alert mindset, which resists complete absorption, comes closer to the state of attention required for collective experiences, which finds its perfect ground in storytelling. Furthermore, film favours a form of reception in which the audience might approach certain aspects of the film unconsciously, hence his concept of the ‘optical unconscious’, to permit a type of recollection otherwise unattainable consciously. Finally, film performs a similar function to the one that Benjamin saw in the ancients’ merging with the cosmos, as developed in ‘To the Planetarium’. In cinemas, the audience interpenetrates with the image on-screen in a mimetic form similar to the ‘absorption in a cosmic experience’, which ancients experienced communally through ecstatic trance (Rausch). Indeed, film spectatorship, with a similar Rausch in the form of an energetic stimulation, ‘embed[s] individual experiences and share[s] them collectively’.134 Film recovers the possibility of a collective, shared experience, which had become impossible in modernity. For Benjamin, therefore, the role of cinema was, on the one hand, to train the senses to cope with stimuli, and, on the other, once the senses had 131 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 80. 132 Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, n17. 133 Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW4, p. 318. 134 This is, in fact, a rhetorical question that Sami Khatib puts in Benjamin’s mouth: ‘Can we think of a new technological medium, a coming tradition in which we can embed individual experiences and share them collectively with a linguistic community beyond functional socialization? If tradition is the ability to transmit and pass on collective experiences (Erfahrungen) in a meaningful way, modernity is not simply without tradition’ (Khatib, ‘Barbaric Salvage: Benjamin and the Dialectics of Destruction’, p. 139).

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recovered their capacity to perceive, to produce a collective and empowering mimetic adaptation of the external world, including fantasy, the imagination, and that which is unreachable. This innervation would finally adapt technology into the collective body, both positively and non-destructively. The human sensorium would not only be trained, but also transformed when adapting technology to the collective organs of the newly formed body.135 If eyes, as Baudelaire describes, ‘have lost the ability to look’,136 the role of film is precisely to restore their capacity to see.

Aesthetics For Benjamin, film was transforming human perception. These changes in the human sensorium were not, however, reducible to the eye. Benjamin maintained that the audience reacts to film images collectively, through the entire body, with the sense of touch as important as sight. The privileging of sight in the perception of the artwork was a product, for Benjamin, of the mode of contemplation, an approach to art that was rendered invalid not only by technological media such as film, but also by the avant-gardism of Dada and surrealism. In the fourth section of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin introduces the intellectual sources through which he planned to develop a 135 In a convolute of The Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes a passage from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and notes that it is connected to his ‘doctrine of revolutions as innervations of the collective’: ‘The transcendence of private property is […] the complete emancipation of all human senses […], but it is this emancipation […] because […] the senses and minds of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop […]; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others […] has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life. It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from that of the crude, nonhuman eye; the human ear different from the crude ear; and so on’ (The Arcades Project, convolute [X1a, 2], p. 652; italics in the original). Marx posits in this passage, on the one hand, that human senses are themselves social organs and, on the other, that, with the superseding of private property, the senses would be emancipated from their individual, reduced scope under capitalism. In a passage that Benjamin skips in the previous quote, Marx furthers his idea about the emancipation of the senses that will be completed once private property has been superseded: ‘The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by man and destined for him. The senses have, therefore, become directly theoreticians in practice. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic character and nature has lost its mere utility by the fact that its utilization has become human utilization’ (Marx, Early Writings, p. 160; italics in the original). 136 Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW4, p. 339.

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new theory of the perception and reception of technologically reproducible art. Benjamin refers to the work of the Vienna School art historians Aloïs Riegl and Franz Wickhoff, given that, unlike the art-historical tradition of their age, they used art to understand the organization of perception in specific artistic periods. Benjamin writes: The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history. The era of the migration of peoples, an era which saw the rise of the Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a different perception.137

Following Riegl’s and Wickhoff’s work, Benjamin forms a general statement that becomes the methodological principle for his essay: ‘Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.’138 Benjamin, therefore, wanted to analyse how the appearance of technologically reproducible art, especially film, had transformed the mode of perception of human collectives. Benjamin returns to Riegl’s theory in the eighteenth section of the essay, to elucidate his theory of the reception in distraction (Zerstreuung) in cinema. For Benjamin, the reception in distraction is ‘a symptom of profound changes in perception’ and ‘finds in the cinemas its central place’.139 Benjamin presents the reception in distraction as antithetical to the reception in contemplation. The reception in cinema has, first of all, attracted a greater mass of participants and, therefore, says Benjamin, requires a new mode of participation. Whereas, for Benjamin, a person who contemplates a work of art is absorbed by it, the masses attract the artwork into themselves—or, as he says in the first version, there is a regrouping of perceptions that is primarily actualized on a taktische basis. Signif icantly, Benjamin uses here this other concept developed by Riegl to stress that cinema is not only approached through the eye. Through the term taktisch, Benjamin compares the reception of architecture, as analysed by Riegl in his Late Roman Art Industry, with cinema.140 For Riegl, buildings are received both tactilely 137 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 104. 138 Ibid.; italics in the original. 139 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), p. 34, italics in the original; and, in the second version, SW3, p. 120. 140 The term used by Benjamin to refer to the tactile element of film is taktisch, which means both tactile and tactical. Riegl used this word originally in his Late Roman Art Industry (1901). However, as early as 1902, Riegl discarded the term taktisch as ambiguous and opted for haptisch,

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and optically.141 Though Riegl concedes that the sense organ most used for the perception of external objects is the eye, this sense only shows us the coloured planes of external objects. It is the tactile sense which perceives the three-dimensionality of the object. According to Riegl, we obtain ‘definite knowledge about the enclosed individual unity of single objects […] only with our sense of touch’.142 It is through repetition that we arrive at a notion of an extended plane with its dimensions of width and height. However, this notion is no longer necessarily obtained by an immediate perception, but through the combination of combined perceptions, both tactile and optical, alongside the intervention of subjective thinking. Benjamin makes a very similar remark and highlights that the tactile perception inherent in architecture is not possible in reception through contemplation. For that reason, Benjamin argues that there are historical points at which the human apparatus of perception is faced with stimuli which cannot be confronted by optical means alone. These stimuli or apperceptions are mastered through habit and are first perceived through tactility. Film, given its shock effects, is predisposed to this type of reception. As the reception of film is not one of contemplation, Benjamin demands that it which, according to him, better conveyed the idea of expressing tactile qualities by optical means. This is one of the reasons why the editors of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften decided to change the word taktisch to taktil. The other reason is that Benjamin authorized the French translation ‘tactile’ in the only version of the essay published in Benjamin’s lifetime. However, in French, the words tactile (tactile) and tactique (tactical) render two different meanings and, therefore, the translator Pierre Klossowski had to choose one to the detriment of the other. With this change, the polysemic meaning of the word taktisch was lost. This polysemy was especially important for the inclusion of f ilm within the debates of the avant-garde and for its political function. Benjamin always thought that a political use of film should be made through a refunctioning (Umfunktionierung) of the medium itself. The political tactics to transform media and make use of them for revolutionary purposes were, therefore, better conveyed through the term taktisch than taktil. The double meaning of the word taktisch, as both ‘tactile’ and ‘tactical’, has always been controversial in German thought. For example, Erwin Panofsky, connected theoretically to both Riegl and Benjamin, was horrif ied by the multiple meaning of many words used in German art history; among them, he cites primarily the word taktisch: ‘the German language unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to declaim from behind a woollen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term. The word taktisch, for example, normally denting “tactical” as opposed to “strategic”, is used in art-historical German as an equivalent of “tactile” or even “textural” as well as “tangible” or “palpable”’ (Panofsky, ‘Three Decades of Art History in the United States’, pp. 329–330; see also Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, p. xxv). 141 This type of reception has been qualified in more recent literature on media and embodied experience as ‘haptic optics’. In fact, as I point out in the previous footnote, Riegl ended up using the word haptic instead of tactile. 142 Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, p. 22.

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be thought of in the light of ‘the theory of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics’.143 Benjamin pursues a counter-history, drawing not on aesthetics as a branch of philosophy that studies art and beauty, but in its original Greek meaning, aisthēsis (αἴσθησις), to denote ‘perception, sensation’. Aristotle defined aisthēsis in De Anima (fourth century B.C.) as concerning all perception, although it was also understood amongst ancient Greeks as a form of perception, a sense, and the sense-object.144 As such, the term stands for perception in which all the senses are employed and impressions are left on the body.145 Benjamin wanted to recover this meaning for his film aesthetics in order to comprehend cinema’s shift in the nature of reception as compared to previous art, as well as to understand how film technology was—in its own process of innervation—transforming the entire human sensorium. The concept of aesthetics has a complicated, if short, history in Western philosophy. The term was (re)introduced in the mid eighteenth century by Alexander Baumgarten, first in his Metaphysics (1742) and then more broadly in his Aesthetica (1750), to refer to the whole range of human perception and sensation, as the original Greek term implied. For him, the aesthetic realm mediates between the abstract sphere of reason and the body-bound particulars of sense.146 As such, the reintroduction of the term in eighteenth-century German thought was still informed by its original meaning. However, the concept increasingly lost this meaning, displaced by the supra-sensorial reception of beauty. Hegel, for example, recognized in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1818–1829; compiled 1835) that the concept ‘aesthetics’ meant precisely the science of sensation, of feeling. For him, however, this conception was unsatisfactory and inadequate to the science he was trying to establish, concerned with the beauty of art. In this way, Hegel thought that a concept that focussed on the feelings that a work of art induced was superficial. To avoid misunderstandings, 143 ‘Work of Art’ (first version), p. 34; ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 120. 144 Urmson, The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary, pp. 13–14. 145 It is no accident that Jacques Rancière entitled one of his books Aisthesis. Through a series of scenes, Rancière shows the process by which a regime of perception, sensation, and interpretation of art is constituted and transformed. According to him, the term ‘aisthesis’ designates the mode of experience through which ‘we perceive very diverse things, whether in their techniques of production or their destination, as all belonging to art’. Thus, aisthesis ‘concerns the sensible fabric of experience within which they are produced’. This entails not only the material conditions, but also modes of perception and regimes of emotion. Rancière is, therefore, like Benjamin, concerned with the transformation of our mode of perception (Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, p. x). 146 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 15.

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he presented his project as a philosophy of fine art.147 Before Hegel, Kant had already reflected on aesthetics within the turn to the subject inherent to his philosophy. In his third critique, he placed the judgement of taste in the subject, who ‘speaks of beauty as if it were a quality of the object’.148 In this way, the subject demands the agreement of the others and claims universality for such a judgement. However, despite this aesthetic quality being dependent on the subject and not on the object, Kant disclaims the role of the senses and argues that no pure judgement of taste as a pure aesthetic judgement should be grounded on sensation.149 Both Kant and Hegel, therefore, situated aesthetics at a distance from the human body, between its materiality and the abstraction of reason. For Schiller, the role of aesthetics was to bring feelings and passions into harmony with reason by depriving them of their dynamic power, their pure physical nature. His intended hope was to reconcile the laws of reason with the interests of the senses by depriving reason of its moral compulsion. Aesthetics was thus envisaged by Schiller as a sphere of freedom located in a medium and transitory stage from the passive state of feeling to the active state of thinking and willing. For Schiller, some senses are still attached to the natural state in which human beings are driven by their natural feelings and instincts. There are other senses, however, able to raise human beings from that state to the aesthetic state. In the 26th letter from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Schiller rejects the sense of touch, while advocating for the role of the eye and the ear. For Schiller, the senses of sight and audition are placed in a privileged position. He considers that nature has gifted human beings with two senses, sight and audition, with which they can grasp knowledge of the real world through semblance alone. In this way, humans have been raised from reality to semblance. In other words, it is through semblance that humanity has entered into culture. Touch, in contrast, is an animal sense with which we have direct contact with objects and, thus, with reality. The object of touch is a force to which we are subjected; the object of eye and ear a form that we engender. As long as man is still a savage he enjoys by means of these tactile senses alone, and at this stage the senses 147 Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, pp. 1–2. 148 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 44; my emphasis. 149 Terry Eagleton argues that ‘Kant’s turn to the subject is hardly a turn to the body’. Corporeal needs and desires are disinterested for Kant and, therefore, fall outside of aesthetic taste. Hence, the Kantian approach to art ends up being ‘a “subjective” but non-sensuous aesthetics’ (Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 21; italics in the original).

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of semblance are merely the servants of these. Either he does not rise to the level of seeing at all, or he is at all events not satisfied with it. Once he does begin to enjoy through the eye, and seeing acquires for him a value of its own, he is already aesthetically free and the play-drive [Spieltrieb] has started to develop.150

Schiller’s claim is that, through aesthetics, human beings distance themselves from the constraints of physical necessities and natural forces. For Schiller, during play, we are free of constraints, both from physical necessities—our corporeal, animal needs—and moral laws. The difference here is the role that Benjamin and Schiller confer on the senses in aesthetic experience. For Schiller, the sense of touch was associated with the natural state and was characteristic of savages. By contrast, seeing was conceived as civilized.151 For Benjamin, on the contrary, the sense of touch allows human beings to experiment and play. In this way, they escape from the enslavement to the fateful forces of nature, which are also present in first technology. Thus, Benjamin remarks that the taktische quality of a second technology, such as film, enlarges the ‘room for play’, to the detriment of semblance.152 Riegl lamented that modern art and modern art theory led people to suppose that the ‘absorption’ of a work of art was only possible through the sense of sight.153 For Riegl, there is always a combination of optical and tactile stimuli in the reception of art. However, whereas Riegl used the term taktisch to deepen the understanding of the production and reception of specific artworks, Benjamin mobilized it in order to analyse a different kind of reception, which, having a predominantly taktische quality, did not permit the spectators to be absorbed into the screen, but rather to absorb the image into themselves.154 Benjamin introduced the taktische quality of film in relation to the Dadaists, who had turned the artwork into a missile that jolted the viewer with a taktische quality. Benjamin thought that film, with its changes of scene and focus, also had a percussive, tactile effect on the 150 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, p. 195. 151 Diane Morgan already addressed this fragment by Schiller in connection with Benjamin’s polarity between play and semblance (Spiel/Schein) in ‘Spielraum et Greifbarkeit: Un acheminement vers une architecture utopique’, pp. 291–301. 152 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n127. 153 Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, p. 341. 154 Tobias Wilke has developed the relevance of film’s taktische Qualität in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, especially in its first version, in his article ‘Tacti(ca)lity Reclaimed: Benjamin’s Medium, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of the Senses’. Wilke argues that ‘by inscribing a tactile element into the heart of the optical sphere, the experience of film establishes an entirely new perceptual constellation’ (p. 47).

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spectators. He described the shock effects of film by comparing them with the contemplation of a painting. The images of a film change quickly and the viewer’s train of associations is immediately interrupted by new images. The painting, by contrast, invites contemplation, because the viewer can give in to their own train of associations. Film is thus the art form that best deals with the shock effects which the urban masses have to face in everyday life.155 For Benjamin, both film and Dadaism provided a tactile impression on the viewers. The difference is that the latter had isolated this taktische quality only for the purpose of revolting against morals, whereas film has generalized this taktische quality. Following Riegl, Benjamin argued that the taktische reception was created by habit and it took the form of ‘casual noticing’, rather than ‘attentive observation’.156 Thus, Benjamin defined the typical state of film spectators, who conceive the film as entertainment, as ‘reception in distraction’ (Zerstreuung). In this new mode of reception of artworks, the body was more directly addressed. As such, there was no longer any room for a traditional conception of aesthetics. With the recuperation of the Greek meaning for aesthetics, Benjamin performed a radical critique of the transmission of this concept in Western philosophy. The emphasis on the eye, as a road to reason in art reception, had arrived not only in 20th-century art theory, but also in film criticism. Admittedly, Benjamin also paid much attention to the new role of the eye in film spectatorship, hence the concept of an ‘optical unconscious’. He wanted, however, to stress that the way that humans approached the images was totally different from previous art. As a consequence, the relationship between subject and object was completely blurred. It was no longer about a reasoning individual subject approaching an object two metres away through optics alone; in film spectatorship, images bombarded the spectators with different stimuli. Indeed, the abolition of the space between body and image invalidated the traditional subject-object opposition.

Second Nature Benjamin addressed the new apperceptions of film through a central concern: how humans relate to nature in technology. In the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, he developed a pair of concepts, first and second nature, which are particularly relevant in grasping the historical shifts in perception 155 Benjamin develops the sort of stimuli which the city dweller has to face in modernity more deeply in his essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. 156 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 120.

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that he sought to theorize. Later, in the second version of the essay, he substituted these concepts with those of first and second technology, which, although retaining some of their conceptual principles, focussed instead of the conception of the technology that was to perform a relationship with second nature. Finally, in the third and, for many years, canonical version of the essay, the two concepts were dropped, impoverishing the conceptual framework of the text. The history of this conceptual pair, first and second nature, in Benjamin’s oeuvre has been particularly overlooked by scholars. I will claim, however, that the concept is central to understanding the ‘new perception’ opened up by film and, not least, Benjamin’s famous concept of the ‘optical unconscious’. The use of the concept of ‘second nature’ can be traced back to a letter from Adorno dated August 1935 regarding Benjamin’s exposé ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. In this letter, Adorno suggests that Benjamin use the Hegelian concept of ‘second nature’, as used by Lukács. Adorno referred specifically to the section ‘Daguerre, or the Panoramas’, in which Benjamin discusses the relation of art to technology and describes the attempts to imitate nature and city life through technical devices, first in panoramas and later with photography.157 The section on Daguerre disappeared from the 1939 exposé, yet the term ‘second nature’ is not mentioned once in the convolutes. Nonetheless, Benjamin did use the concept in the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, written only a few months after the above-mentioned letter. Despite the fact that the concept appears only residually in his writings, I will claim via Adorno that the term was always surreptitiously present in his oeuvre.158 Lukács borrowed the concept of ‘second nature’ from Hegel and used it for the first time in The Theory of the Novel, written between 1914 and 1916.159 ‘Second nature’ refers to the world of human convention, or, in other words, the human-made structures of the social world in opposition to untouched nature. This ‘first nature’ could be defined as what is commonly understood to be nature: the mountains, the sea, the plants, everything 157 Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, c.2-4 August 1935 (The Complete Correspondence, p. 110). 158 Adorno was very perceptive to notice the presence of this concept in Benjamin’s thought; for example, in the term ‘natural history’ in the Trauerspiel book (see Adorno’s lecture ‘The Idea of Natural History’, analysed below). In ‘Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, Adorno claims that ‘second nature’ was a key concept in Benjamin’s work (Prisms, p. 233). I will also argue that an earlier passage related to f ilm, from 1927, was inherently dialogic with Lukács’s concept of ‘second nature’. 159 Hegel understood ‘second nature’ as the world of conventions created by man in opposition to his purely animal being. For example, in The Philosophy of History, Hegel conceives morality as duty (i.e. substantial Right) in terms of ‘second nature’, in contrast to the first nature of man, which is ‘his primary merely animal existence’ (Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 55).

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independent of the agency of man, including, crucially, the organic human body. In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács presents the modern reified world as incomprehensible to a subject for whom second nature does not and cannot offer any meaning, in contrast to the epic world of the Greeks, in which a totality of life was directly assumed.160 For Lukács, the novel was the epic of an age in which that extensive totality of life was no longer directly given and the immanence of meaning in life had become a problem, although the novel still thought of such a time in terms of totality. Adorno used this concept from his 1932 lecture ‘The Idea of Natural History’ until Aesthetic Theory, posthumously published in 1970. For both Adorno and Lukács, the dangerous thing about second nature is that it presents itself as if it were first nature and, as such, presents social conditions as a natural state. In the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin uses the concept second nature in a similar way to Lukács. However, he was increasingly keen to complicate this division, to argue that nature had always been affected by humans.161 Consequently, he eventually turned the concepts into first and second technology in the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay. In the first version of this essay, Benjamin describes the technology liberated from a ritual function as a second nature. He points out that this second nature now stands as elemental to modern society as first nature stood to primeval society. In other words, second nature appears to contemporary society as first nature. Benjamin argues, in the same manner as Lukács, that we cannot control second nature anymore: ‘Humans of course invented, but no longer by any means master this second nature which they now confront; they are thus just as compelled to undertake an apprenticeship as they were once when confronted with first nature.’162 This is similar to the argument made by Lukács in ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (1923), in which he not only conceptualizes ‘second nature’ as a human construct, but also as completely interpenetrated by the commodity form. In this way, Lukács argues that human beings ‘erect around themselves in the reality they have created and “made”, a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier on with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the social relations which 160 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 56. 161 In The Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes a fragment from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to claim that man’s real nature is the nature which develops in social history: ‘The nature which develops in human history—the genesis of human society—is man’s real nature; hence, nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature’ (The Arcades Project, convolute [X1a, 3], p. 652; italics in the original). 162 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), pp. 18–19.

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appear in this form).’163 Lukács elaborates here upon a point made by Marx in the section about the fetishism of commodities in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital (1867). In that chapter, Marx reflects on the fetishistic relation adopted by commodities, which appear, as in ‘the misty realm of religion’, to have a life of their own, independently of the agency of humans: The value character of the products of labour becomes firmly established only when they act as magnitudes of value. These magnitudes vary continually, independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them.164

Benjamin apprehends that people in this reified world cannot master the same second nature that appears alien to them. Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that people, even if they do not have the capacity to control second nature, can at least take an apprenticeship and learn how to confront it, as people in primeval society did with regard to first nature. It is here where Benjamin brings film into play: ‘art once again places itself at the service of such an apprenticeship—and in particular film’.165 Thus, Benjamin presents film as a training ground for human beings ‘in those new apperceptions and reactions demanded by interaction with an apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily’.166 Benjamin conceived the cinema as a training ground for the transformation of the human beings’ relation to second nature and, at the same time, for the innervation in the collective body of the audience a technology liberated from ritual—a technology that, despite being second nature to the collective, could become their own first nature, their own body. Benjamin had introduced this argument in the first text he devoted to film, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’ (1927). In this short text, Benjamin suggests that, thanks 163 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 128. 164 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, I, pp. 167–168. 165 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), p. 19. 166 Ibid. If one pays attention to this point in the context of the discussion of second nature in the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, it can be recognized that the apparatus is not only film, but second nature in general. Michael W. Jennings and Tobias Wilke have thus claimed that Benjamin was ‘reconceiving second nature itself as an apparatus’. Therefore, it is not only the film medium, but also ‘second nature as an apparatus [that] both mediates the objects of our perception and in doing so alters its very nature’ (Jennings and Wilke, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, Grey Room, 39 [2010], p. 9).

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to the dissecting tools of film and its dual optical and tactile apperceptions, second nature could be transformed from something incomprehensible into something sensuously comprehensible and meaningful for the collective. The language which Benjamin uses to develop this point is very similar to that used by Lukács when he presented the concept of second nature in The Theory of the Novel. As such, it can be argued that Benjamin, both in the ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’ and the ‘Work of Art’ essay, is constructing a reply to Lukács and his conception of second nature.167 Lukács described the estrangement from first nature and the creation of a second nature in the self-made human environment as a prison for human beings, instead of as a parental home. This second nature appeared as a complex of senses and meanings which had become rigid and strange for people: [These senses and meanings] form the world of convention, a world from whose all-embracing power only the innermost recesses of the soul are exempt, a world which is present everywhere in a multiplicity of forms too complex for understanding. Its strict laws, both in becoming and in being, are necessarily evident to the cognisant subject, but despite its regularity, it is a world that does not offer itself either as meaning to the aim-seeking subject or as matter, in sensuous immediacy, to the active subject. It is a second nature, and, like nature (first nature), it is determinable only as the embodiment of recognised but senseless necessities and therefore it is incomprehensible, unknowable in its real substance.168

For Lukács, then, the subject was unable to find meaning in second nature through their senses. In contrast, Benjamin thought that, after the proliferation of film, the second nature of people’s immediate environment could be transformed from a prison-world into a journey of adventure. For him, film had the historical task of making second nature sensuously recognizable to human beings, augmented by a training in which human beings become 167 It is impossible to prove that Benjamin was influenced by The Theory of the Novel when he wrote ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, although it is certain that, at that stage, Benjamin was already familiar with Lukács. Benjamin first came into contact with the work of Lukács through a review of History and Class Consciousness written by Ernst Bloch. This contact is mentioned in a letter to Scholem from 13 June 1924 written in Capri (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 241). On 30 October 1928, in another letter to Scholem, Benjamin mentions that he has written a text that develops a new theory of the novel and should lay claim to a place beside Lukács, although it is unclear to which text Benjamin refers (Ibid., p. 342). It seems plausible, therefore, that, by 1928, Benjamin had already read Lukács’s book. In his 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, Benjamin quotes The Theory of the Novel. 168 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 62.

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apprentices in the new nature. Benjamin presents the role of cinema as dynamite that explodes an otherwise incomprehensible second nature to provide a new understanding of it through a journey across its ruins: To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism in which the spaces of the immediate environment—the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations, and enjoy their leisure—are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way. In themselves these offices, furnished rooms, saloons, big-city streets, stations, and factories are ugly, incomprehensible, and hopelessly sad. Or rather, they were and seemed to be, until the advent of film. The cinema then exploded this entire prison-world with the dynamite of its fractions of a second, so that now we can take extended journeys of adventure between their widely scattered ruins.169

The advent of cinema brought about the possibility of offering an understanding of a world otherwise incomprehensible. Although Benjamin does not mention second nature here, we can understand that the spaces of everyday life—the offices, furnished rooms, big-city streets, etc.—which are incomprehensible are, in fact, second nature. Miriam Hansen has argued that this fragment referred to the city film genre—a genre that includes films such as Manhatta (Charles Scheeler and Paul Strand, 1922), Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, dir. Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929)—rather than to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, the nominal subject of the article.170 I would like to claim that Benjamin does not allude specifically either to the city film genre or Battleship Potemkin. These remarks are rather a general illustration of the interpenetration of the film apparatus with the physical environment and the new perception that arises from these relations. Hence, the film apparatus mediates the objects of our perception and transforms them into something different. For this reason, Benjamin did not hesitate to repeat a portion of this fragment in the ‘Work of Art’ essay.

Film as Dynamite Benjamin describes film as the dynamite that explodes the ‘prison-world’ in which people live, that which is nothing other than second nature. The 169 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 17. 170 Hansen, ‘Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema’, p. 22.

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fractions of a second of film’s discontinuous nature turn second nature into rubble, making it, like ruins, a more accessible object of interpretation. In other works, it renders second nature legible. This idea is similar to the argument regarding ruins presented in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925–1928) and that book’s concomitant concept of ‘natural history’ (Naturgeschichte).171 It comes as no surprise that, in his 1932 lecture ‘The Idea of Natural History’, Adorno compared Benjamin’s conception of Naturgeschichte to Lukács’s ‘second nature’. A closer analysis of this text sheds light on the role bestowed to film in the interpretation of the second nature of humanity’s ‘prison-world’. In his lecture, Adorno argued that he used the term ‘natural history’ in order ‘to dialectically overcome the usual antithesis of nature and history’ and confront the ontological interpretation of history proposed by Martin Heidegger, who, in his Being and Time (1927), understood history as an all-embracing structure of being, equivalent to its own ontology.172 Adorno attempted to establish a concrete unity between history and nature against the division of nature and spirit or nature and history posited by the tradition of subjectivistic idealism.173 According to Susan Buck-Morss, by understanding the concepts of nature and history dialectically as mutually determining, ‘Adorno refused to grant either nature or history the status of an ontological first principle.’174 Furthermore, each concept provided the key to the demystification of the other. For Adorno, history and nature each had two poles: one dynamic and the other static. Thus, nature had a double character: on the one hand, a positive, materialist pole, referring to concrete, existing living beings—both the material products of humans’ labour and their own corporeal bodies—and, on the other, a negative one, nature understood as the world not yet incorporated into history, not yet penetrated by reason, out of human control. Nature, in this latter pole, was posited as mythical, as what is eternally there. History, similarly, insofar as it was determined by the fact that it was only reproducing the same social relations, could be conceived as natural rather than historical. Adorno wanted to maintain these two poles—transitoriness and myth—for his project. For, if nature and history were posited as theoretical ontological principles, the double character of both nature and history would be lost and, with it, the potential for critical negativity: ‘either social conditions were affirmed as “natural” without regard for their historical 171 Hereafter, I will refer to this text as the Trauerspiel book. 172 Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, p. 111. 173 Ibid., pp. 116–117. 174 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, p. 49.

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becoming, or the actual historical process was affirmed as essential’.175 The irrational material suffering of history could therefore be understood as mere contingency, as in the case of Hegel, or as something essential to history, as with Heidegger. The result, argues Buck-Morss, was always the ideological justification of the status quo. According to Adorno, with the concept of ‘second nature’, Lukács had already envisioned the idea of understanding petrif ied history as nature and the petrif ied life of nature as the mere product of historical development. However, according to Adorno, Lukács did so in an eschatological context. Benjamin, on the contrary, ‘brought the resurrection of second nature out of infinite distance into infinite closeness and made it an object of philosophical interpretation’.176 In order to avoid the enchantment of history, Benjamin understood history, in his book on the Trauerspiel, in terms of the first nature which passes away. He realized this idea through an analysis of the long-neglected German Baroque allegorists. Benjamin showed that, for these writers, the theme of the allegorical was essentially history, and the ruins, its setting. It was the Baroque poets who saw in nature eternal transience and, as a result, were about to recognize history. According to Adorno: The deepest point where history and nature converge lies precisely in this element of transience. If Lukács demonstrates the retransformation of the historical, as that which has been, into nature, then here is the other side of the phenomenon: nature itself is seen as transitory nature, as history.177

Adorno argues that, for Benjamin, nature is transitory and, consequently, includes elements of history. History, in turn, is written in the countenance of nature, as transience. The form of the ruin thus takes the allegorical physiognomy of natural history; or, in other words, history, represented in the ruin, assumes the process of irresistible decay. Allegory’s function is to petrify history and show that it is part of nature. Nature, in turn, shows marks of transience; it passes away with history. In this moment of transience and interruption, what has been sorrowful or unsuccessful can be expressed and rescued; the untimely is actualized in the present through allegory. Allegory was, for Benjamin, ‘a form of expression’ that signified phenomena that were originally present, but had passed away.178 Adorno thought 175 Ibid., p. 54. 176 Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, p. 119. 177 Ibid. 178 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 162.

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that, only through a subjective intention, as that of allegory, can we give signification to second nature. For him, second nature is always illusory, because we think that we understand it, but it is only a semblance of that which has been historically produced. Thus, we can understand the aim of allegory as to see through the false appearance of second nature. Adorno writes: Whenever an historical element appears it refers back to the natural element that passes away within it. Likewise the reverse: whenever ‘second nature’ appears, when the world of convention approaches, it can be deciphered in that its meaning is shown to be precisely its transience.179

Ruins are the physiognomy of natural history precisely because they show the transience of second nature. It can be argued that film, by exploiting the given reality with ‘the dynamite of its fractions of a second’ and turning it into ruins, can, to some extent, decipher its meaning, give a signification to a reality which was hitherto incomprehensible. In other words, film makes second nature legible. In his writings on Chaplin, Benjamin acknowledged, although only secondarily, that film had an allegorical function.180 The dynamite of film explodes the given reality of second nature and reduces it to rubble, showing the transience of that nature. This allegorical, destructive quality of film recalls, therefore, the allegorical function that Benjamin perceived in Baudelaire. At the same time, this destructive, allegorical function connects to Benjamin’s continuous interest in blasting away the idea of history as a homogeneous empty line, to dispel the myth of the appearance of the given material reality as permanent, to show ‘history not as a systematic unity, but as fully discontinuous’.181 This idea can be found in the image of the kaleidoscope, which Benjamin brings up in the collection of notes devoted to the allegorical intention of Baudelaire entitled ‘Central Park’ (1938–1939). Benjamin uses this image to illustrate his theory of history as catastrophe. It is an image of the child’s kaleidoscope, ‘which, with every turn of the hand dissolves the established order into a new array’.182 The ruling class, says Benjamin, uses concepts of history which 179 Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, p. 120. 180 I will return to the allegorical function of film and to the fragmentariness of the film form in Chapter 4, given Benjamin left some cautious notes on the relation of Chaplin to allegory. I will develop Chaplin’s performance in connection to Benjamin’s conception of allegory to deepen the broader connection between film as an apparatus and allegory. 181 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, pp. 56–57. 182 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, SW4, p. 164.

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are like the mirrors of the kaleidoscope that enable the image of order to prevail. Benjamin, however, is interested in the moment of smashing the kaleidoscope. At that moment, the social order is broken into pieces and its transience is revealed. According to Benjamin, film, with its fragmentary nature, can perform a similar task. In a fragment related to the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin argues that a theory of film would need to take account of its dialectical structure, in which ‘discontinuous images replace one another in a continuous sequence’.183 This dialectic between discontinuity and continuity is already present in the image of the kaleidoscope. Its dialectical structure is built upon the polarity of the concept of ‘natural history’, that is, transience and myth, and hence it is fundamental to understanding Benjamin’s theories on film within his broader philosophical project.184 Nonetheless, film not only shows that second nature is transient, and therefore demystifies its mythic pole, but also brings about a new perspective to penetrate and make that second nature sensuously recognizable to the collective. Thus, the dynamite of film, on exploding the given reality, demystifies the idea of second nature as natural and, at the same time, recovers the very moments of contingency that threaten to pass away. The ‘optical unconscious’ gains significance precisely at this point.

The Optical Unconscious Benjamin’s first reference to the optical unconscious can be found in ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, when he writes that ‘with film a new realm of consciousness comes into being’.185 Though vague, it is in this text that Benjamin first alludes to this process that results from technologies of reproduction. 183 Benjamin, ‘The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression’, SW3, p. 94. 184 In a convolute from The Arcades Project, Benjamin compares the tendency of this project with the opposition in (silent) film ‘between the downright jerky rhythm of the image sequence, which satisf ies the deep-seated need of this generation to see the “flow” of “development” disavowed, and the continuous musical accompaniment’. Thus, Benjamin understands that what film does is what he wants to do in his theory of writing history: ‘To root out every trace of “development” from the image of history and to represent becoming—through the dialectical rupture between sensation and tradition—as a constellation in being’ (The Arcades Project, convolute [Hº, 16], p. 845). In short, Benjamin understood the dialectical relation between discontinuity and continuity inherent in film in similar terms to his project of disclaiming the concept of historical progress. 185 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 17; italics in the original.

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I would like to argue that the concept of the ‘optical unconscious’, long discussed and misinterpreted, should be understood in relation to film’s allegorical function, as discussed above. For Benjamin, film’s ‘prismatic’ work unveils and refracts the second nature that permeates everyday life. That ‘other nature’ now appears, through the mediation of the cinematographic apparatus, differently to our eyes. Second nature thus becomes legible, an object of interpretation, whilst the optical unconscious can also rescue—similarly to the function of allegory—moments of contingency which would otherwise be lost. Benjamin first uses the term ‘optical unconscious’ in ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931). For Benjamin, the photographic camera, as a result of its technological nature, is able to record and store aspects of reality which remained invisible to the naked eye. In this recording and storage, moments of contingency that were previously imperceptible are released and the beholder can access them in the contemplation of the photograph. Thus, the photograph’s beholder, says Benjamin, ‘feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject’.186 In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin returns to the optical unconscious to describe it in similar terms: Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.187

Benjamin argues that the film apparatus captures aspects of reality which are unnoticeable through immediate perception. This ‘other nature’ (eine 186 Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, SW2, p. 510. 187 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 117.

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andere Natur) that speaks directly to the unconscious could be claimed to be ‘second nature’.188 Benjamin, however, did not introduce the term until the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, while the idea of ‘another nature which speaks to the camera’ is formulated for the first time a few years earlier in ‘Little History of Photography’, in a fragment which is repeated verbatim in the former text. Benjamin might refer here to an enlarged conception of nature, as he did in ‘To the Planetarium’, which would include ‘second nature’ alongside the ‘first’: the ‘tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call “Nature”’.189 The main idea, in any case, is that this nature has already been transformed by humans and become ‘other’ because the subject has projected their unconscious onto the object. Joshua Gold sought to address this question by placing the aforementioned fragment with Benjamin’s early theory of language. In his article, Gold concludes that Benjamin approached the ‘modern visual technologies in terms of their capacity to vocalize the extremities of modern experience, thereby rendering audible (and hence intelligible) what would otherwise remain mute’.190 In ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916), Benjamin presented the act of naming as the attempt to complete the Creation of God and restore the primordial state of the world as paradise before the Fall of Man. For Benjamin, nature is mute. This does not mean that nature is non-communicable, rather that nature is speechless. Nature, nonetheless, is imbued with an unspoken language, the residue of the creative word of God. Man has the gift of naming and can, through language as a medium, give voice to nature. Benjamin describes the act of naming as a translation of the mute into the sonic, of the nameless into name: ‘It is therefore the translation of an imperfect language into a more perfect one, and cannot but add something to it, namely knowledge.’191 Into the 188 Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, also refers to ‘another nature’ (‘einer andern Natur’), which is, in this case, the product of human imagination in the field of aesthetics. Translator James Creed Meredith has symptomatically translated this ‘other nature’ as ‘second nature’: ‘The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature. […] By this means we come to feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical employment of the imagination), with the result that the material can be borrowed by us from nature in accordance with that law, but be worked up by us into something else—namely, what surpasses nature’ (Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 143). It can be argued that, in Benjamin, that ‘other nature’ which speaks to the camera is also a material borrowed from nature which is worked up by the very mediation of the apparatus. 189 Benjamin, ‘One Way Street’, SW1, p. 487. 190 Gold, ‘Another Nature Which Speaks to the Camera’, p. 603; italics in the original. 191 Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, SW1, p. 70.

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20th century, Benjamin considered film as the medium par excellence to articulate the stunted speech of nature. This nature is not the ‘first’ nature of creation, but rather—as he puts it in the text on Potemkin—the nature of our ‘off ices, furnished rooms, saloons, big-city streets, stations, and factories’.192 In this passage, the cinematographic apparatus articulates the speech of nature, but a nature which is second nature to us. Film has the capacity to translate the imperfect language of second nature, our physical surroundings, into a more perfect language. According to Gold, the revolutionary potential of film and photography to transform human perception is activated through a form of disclosure of the physical surroundings opened up by the optical unconscious. This simultaneously entails a mode of articulation. The task of the film apparatus in modernity is precisely to articulate the shocks of modern life and render communicable aspects of experience which had hitherto remained incomprehensible to the subject. The optical unconscious can be conceived, in this sense, as the potential opened up by the mediation of film technology to reveal a world which had previously remained unseen to our naked eye. Film has a revelatory capacity to show and grant speech to a world that previously remained mute and hidden. This theme was very popular in the first years of film criticism, as well as among classical film theorists. For example, Gustav Melcher, writing in 1909 for Der Kinematograph, describes film as a new visual organ through which we see the world in a totally different way than with the naked eye. For him, ‘[t]he primitive visual tools given to us by nature’ are only the foundation of ‘the eyes of today’, through which the optical horizon is vastly expanded: The cinematograph is a new visual organ: an expanded and improved eye. If this organ can be used creatively, as indeed the cinematic slapstick has already proven it can, then its true value lies in its ability to augment our faculty of sight.193

For Melcher, film has expanded our field of vision. It is worth noting that, like Benjamin, Melcher emphasizes slapstick’s power to reveal the world with sharper definition. This diverges from the emphasis of other theorists on documentary or scientific films, notably Dziga Vertov, who famously coined 192 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 17. 193 Gustav Melcher, ‘On Living Photography and the Film Drama’, f irst published in Der Kinematograph, 17 February 1909; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Alex H. Bush and Jon Cho-Polizzi, p. 18.

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the concept of ‘kino-eye’ to refer to the perfected vision of the camera in contrast to the ‘the imperfect human eye’.194 For Vertov, the cinematographic apparatus was superior because it was freed from human immobility and led to the creation of a fresh perception. The Hungarian artist Lázlo Moholy-Nagy arrives at a similar concept in his book Painting, Photography, Film (1925), which Benjamin quotes in his essay on photography. Repeating the trope of film as a more developed eye, Moholy-Nagy argues that the camera has expanded the visual image, which is no longer tied to the ‘narrow limits of our eye’.195 In a similar vein to Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’, Moholy-Nagy writes: For if people had been aware of these potentialities they would have been able with the aid of the photographic camera to make visible existences which cannot be perceived or taken in by our optical instrument, the eye; i.e., the photographic camera can either complete or supplement our optical instrument, the eye.196

For him, technologies of reproduction have changed and deepened our perception, revealing a world previously invisible to the unequipped human eye. For that reason, Moholy-Nagy argues that, after a hundred years of photography and a few decades of film, ‘we see the world with entirely different eyes’.197 He laments, however, that most of the capacities which are offered up by these technologies have not yet been fully exploited. The ideas developed by Rudolf Arnheim and Béla Balázs perhaps have more resonance with Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious. In the sixteenth section of the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin complements his ideas on the ‘optical unconscious’ with more technical terminology, attributable to his reading of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art (1932): With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. And just as enlargement not merely clarif ies what we see indistinctly ‘in any case’, but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them—aspects ‘which do not 194 Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, in Kino-Eye, pp. 84–85. 195 Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, p. 7. 196 Ibid., p. 28; italics in the original. 197 Ibid., p. 29.

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appear as the retarding of natural movements but have a curious gliding, floating character of their own.’198

In the passage that surrounds this quote, Arnheim advocates the camera’s use of slow motion and acceleration to reveal the mechanism of the human face and the body.199 Though Arnheim’s approach to film was different to Benjamin’s, he discovered some artistic capacities in the film apparatus which were similar to the optical unconscious. Like Benjamin, Arnheim thought that the camera might make objects speak. By limiting entire areas of sensory perception and bringing others into relief, Arnheim argues that a film director ‘can let the dumb speak and thereby interpret the sphere of sound’.200 Arnheim talks here about silent film. In this sense, he points to the vocalizing of ‘another nature’, which otherwise remains mute. Arnheim argues that a director does not only reveal the world objectively, but also subjectively and can thus ‘intervene in the structure of nature’, to make connections between events and objects, to create new worlds and ‘breathe life into stone’.201 Here, Arnheim and Benjamin diverge in their thinking. Benjamin grants no agency to the director in his theory on the ‘optical unconscious’. The director or the cinematographer—Benjamin never makes a distinction between the two—inscribes in the recording a ‘here and now’, actualized in the moment of reception. The ‘optical unconscious’ closes the gap between these two moments, inscription and reception, granting the spectator a mimetic disjuncture with regard to the image on-screen which could give way to a process of cognition through estrangement.202 For Benjamin, however, the unconscious always belongs to the spectator, not to the director. Béla Balázs developed a similar notion, that film has the capacity to attribute a consciousness to objects. In a similar vein to Benjamin, Balázs argues that the camera can reveal a world ‘which could not otherwise be seen with the naked eye or in everyday life’.203 As such, the camera is able to provide new meaning and significance to the objects depicted. For him, it is not mere reproduction or mimesis, because the objects transform through production and projection. For Balázs, then, the camera can 198 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 117 199 Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 100. 200 Ibid., pp. 113–114. 201 Ibid., p. 114. 202 See Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 157. 203 Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 65.

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give physiognomic qualities to objects and endow them with ‘visual anthropomorphism’.204 In this way, he talks not only about the face of things, but also about the soul of objects, the secret language of ‘dumb things’, the rhythm of crowds and the hidden life of little things: The first new world discovered by the film camera in the days of the silent film was the world of very small things visible only from very short distances, the hidden life of little things. By this the camera showed us not only hitherto unknown objects and events: the adventures of beetles in a wilderness of blades of grass, the tragedies of day-old chicks in a corner of the poultry-run, the erotic battles of flowers and the poetry of miniature landscapes. It brought us not only new themes. By means of the close-up the camera in the days of the silent film revealed also the hidden mainsprings of a life which we had thought we already knew so well. […] The close-up has not only widened our vision of life, it has also deepened it.205

Balázs’s argument regarding the close-up could have easily influenced Benjamin, for whom the close-up accentuates ‘hidden details in familiar objects’ and explores ‘commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera’.206 Balázs finds in these early films a combination of both artistic and scientif ic qualities, an idea that Benjamin proposes in the thirteenth thesis of the 1939, third version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, in which he introduces the ‘optical unconscious’. There, Benjamin compares the perspective introduced by film in comparison to that of theatre or painting to argue that ‘filmed action lends itself more readily to analysis because it delineates situations far more precisely’.207 Similarly to Balázs, Benjamin contends that film permits the interpenetration of film and science. As an illustration, he provides the example of the shot of a flexed muscle, about which, he claims, ‘it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science’.208 Benjamin and Balázs knew each other and engaged in theoretical debates.209 Miriam Hansen argues that both Benjamin and Balázs tried to appropriate anthropological, mimetic, 204 Ibid., p. 60. 205 Ibid., pp. 54–55. 206 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 117. 207 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (third version), SW4, p. 265. 208 Ibid. 209 There are records of, at least, one conversation between them in the end of 1929 which revolved around language.

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and mnemotecnic dimensions of the concept of image developed by Le­ bensphilosophie. However, while the vitalists rejected film as part of the problem of the loss of experience, Balázs and Benjamin sought to redefine the possibility of experience in this medium.210 Although Benjamin never quoted Balázs in any of his texts on film, Gertrud Koch argues that the influence of Balázs on Benjamin is undeniable.211 A striking similarity between both authors is evident in their theorization of the close-up. In Benjamin’s definitions of the optical unconscious in both ‘Little History of Photography’ and the ‘Work of Art’ essay, he claims that, with film, we become, for the first time, familiar with ‘what really goes on between hand and metal’ in the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon and how this relation between body and object changes according to different moods.212 This is possible, argues Benjamin, given the camera’s ability ‘for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object’.213 Balázs, in his theory of the close-up, states it thus: ‘The close-up can show us a quality in a gesture of the hand we never noticed before when we saw that hand stroke or strike something.’214 For both, the cinematographic apparatus offers a revelatory function with which to unveil the relation between human beings and matter. Furthermore, with both, there is a projection of the human towards the external world. Balázs argues that the camera can give physiognomic qualities not only to animate objects, but also to inanimate ones. As a result, the soul of nature emerges in the discourse: ‘By the soul of nature we always mean our own soul which is reflected in the former.’215 This introduction reflects a component of Lebensphilosophie, in which nature can return the glance. This latter idea has affinities with Benjamin’s argument that objects have the capacity to return their gaze, a quality of the aura which is also present in the ‘optical unconscious’. His reading is more profane though. Whereas Balázs appeals to the soul, Benjamin alludes to the unconscious, in direct reference to psychoanalysis. In Benjamin’s articulation of the ‘optical unconscious’ through psychoanalytic terms, he argues that the cinematic apparatus reveals a world that remains unseen to the human eye, similar to the psychic unconscious, which 210 Hansen, ‘Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors’, p. 171. 211 See Koch, ‘Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things’, pp. 167–177. 212 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 117. 213 Ibid. 214 Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 55. 215 Balázs, Schriften zum Film I (1922–1926), ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Munich: Hanser, 1982), p. 100; quoted in Koch, ‘Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things’, p. 170.

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reveals itself only through analytic interpretation. As with the instinctual unconscious, the camera captures aspects of reality which lie outside the normal spectrum of sense impressions. The relation of the ‘optical unconscious’ to Freud is expanded in the third version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay (1939). Benjamin argues there that, just as the book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) ‘isolated and made analyzable things which had previously floated unnoticed on the broad stream of perception’, film accomplished a ‘similar deepening of apperception throughout the entire spectrum of optical—and now also auditory—impressions’.216 There is, however, a crucial difference between Benjamin’s optical unconscious and Freud’s theories of the unconscious. As Miriam Hansen notes, Benjamin not only locates the unconscious in the human subject, but also outside the subject in the material world.217 Through the ‘optical unconscious’, Benjamin expresses the potential of the camera to lend physiognomic expression to objects so that second nature returns the gaze.218 For her, this potential of the camera would be a profane expression of the aura, which rests upon ‘a projection of a social experience among human beings onto nature’, as Benjamin himself defined it in ‘Central Park’.219 Hansen claims that, in the ‘optical unconscious’, there is a similar psychic projection from subject to object. The beholder may encounter something encrypted in the image that triggers the involuntary memory. The film apparatus in either case is the necessary medium for this two-way process of projection and reception. The second nature that displays itself to the eye through the mediation of the camera—that is, in the medium of technology—reveals the content of the beholder’s psyche, which, according to Esther Leslie, becomes externalized in the technological effects of the apparatus. 220 This argument, however, has been misunderstood by a number of scholars. Michael Taussig, for example, argues that Benjamin confounds subject with object by situating the unconscious in the object rather than in the perceiver.221 Similarly, Rosalind Krauss wonders whether visual phenomena can have an unconscious, positing that it is incomprehensible to place an unconscious in the optical field. She argues—in relation to the apprehension of mass movements by the camera—that mass patterns organized within 216 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (third version), SW4, p. 265. In this way, Benjamin implies that, with the arrival and spread of sound film, an ‘acoustic unconscious’ also came into being. 217 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 156. 218 Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, pp. 209–110. 219 Ibid., pp. 187–188; Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, SW4, p. 173. 220 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 156. 221 Taussig, ‘Tactility and Distraction’, p. 149.

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the visual field can have an unconscious, but, in the eventuality that there would be a ‘collective unconscious’, it would ultimately be a human one.222 These authors, therefore, did not understand the psychic projection onto the object that the ‘optical unconscious’ involves. The concept derives, in fact, from the surrealists, rather than from Freud. In ‘Dream Kitsch’ (1927), Benjamin argues that, in the picture puzzles of their dream-works, the surrealists search the content of dreams on the trail of things. In this way, surrealists turn things towards the world of dream and thus ‘take in the energies of an outlived world of things’.223 Objects end up yielding to the interior of human beings. Benjamin understands that film spectatorship takes, as dream does for the surrealists, an objective direction, one directed towards the world of things. It is in this way that Benjamin makes external objects speak to the camera, revealing in them—qua projection—aspects of our own nature and providing them with an unconscious. The ‘optical unconscious’ permits, therefore, a recollection of experiences from the external world. This recollection is part of the innervation championed by Benjamin, since there is a porous interchange of stimuli between the collective subject of the audience and the ‘world of things’ on-screen, which can produce the necessary current of energy to innervate a collective body. Furthermore, Benjamin thought that film had opened up the possibility of dissecting the second nature that had been hitherto incomprehensible to human beings. Thus, out of the fragments dynamited by the camera, film could articulate a new understanding of the world that was more comprehensible to the collective audience of cinemas. Benjamin, therefore, conceded both a cognitive and an experimental function to film, which was approached through the very materiality of the collective body that filled the cinema theatres. As a training ground, cinema could help restore the capacities of the human sensorium to favour a positive adaptation of technology through a collective innervation.

Bibliography Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967). — ‘The Idea of Natural History’, Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought, 60 (1984), pp. 111–124. 222 Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 179. 223 Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch: The Gloss of Surrealism’, SW2, p. 4.

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Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence (1928–1940), ed. by Henri Lonitz, trans. by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Rudolf Arnheim, Film As Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. and ed. by Edith Bone (New York: Dover Publications, 1970). Léa Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies. From Phenomenology to Marxism: Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on Embodiment’, Anthropology & Materialism, 1 (2017), pp. 1–15. Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, ‘Walter Benjamin on Blushing: New translations of fragments on colour and some inflationary reading notes’, unpublished text, available at (accessed 6 September 2019). Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985). — Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), VI (1989). — The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), I (1996). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), II (1999). — The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), III (2002). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), IV (2003). — ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (first version), Grey Room, 39 (2010), pp. 11–37. Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, trans. by Laimdota Mazzarins (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996). Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1977).

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— ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October, 62 (1992), pp. 3–41. Matthew Charles, ‘Secret Signals from Another World: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Innervation’, New German Critique, 45:3 (2018), pp. 39–72. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. by John Goodman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Howard Eiland, ‘On Benjamin’s Film Theory’, The Promise of Cinema, 10 October 2016, available at (accessed 6 September 2019). Sergei M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, ed. and trans. by Richard Taylor, 4 vols. (London: BFI/Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988–1996), I (1988). Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. by Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson, trans. by Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Joshua Robert Gold, ‘“Another Nature Which Speaks to the Camera”: Film and Translation in the Writings of Walter Benjamin’, MLN, 122:3 (2007), pp. 602–622. Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 179–224. — ‘Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney’, in South Atlantic Quarterly, 92:1 (1993), pp. 27–61. — ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, Critical Inquiry, 25:2 (1999), pp. 306–343. — ‘Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema’, October, 109 (2004), pp. 3–45. — ‘“Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors”: Potemkin and German Film Theory’, New German Critique, 95 (2005), pp. 162–179. — Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 2012). G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. by F.P.B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920). — The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001). Michael Jennings and Tobias Wilke, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, Special Issue ‘Walter Benjamin’s Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art’, Grey Room, 39 (2010), pp. 6–9. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, eds., The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. by James Creed Meredith, ed. by Nicholas Walker (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Sami Khatib, ‘Barbaric Salvage: Benjamin and the Dialectics of Destruction’, parallax, 24:2 (2018), pp. 135–158.

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Gertrud Koch, ‘Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things’, trans. by Miriam Hansen, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 167–177. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1993). Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000). Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971). — The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. by Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971). Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. and ed. by T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts & Co., 1963). — Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976–1981), I (1976). Lázlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. by Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969). Diane Morgan, ‘Spielraum et Greifbarkeit: Un acheminement vers une architecture utopique’, in Spielraum: W. Benjamin et l’architecture, ed. by Libero Andreotti (Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2011), pp. 291–301. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York: Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 321–346. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. by Zakir Paul (London/New York: Verso, 2013). Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). Aloïs Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. by Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985). — Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. by Jacqueline E. Jung (New York: Zone Books, 2004). Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, trans., with an intro., by Christina Svendsen (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2012). Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967). Jan Sieber, ‘Technique as a Pure Means. On Walter Benjamin’s Non-instrumentalist Concept of Technique’, Anthropological Materialism (2012), n.p.; available at (accessed 6 September 2019). — ‘Técnica’, in Glosario Walter Benjamin. Conceptos y figuras, ed. by Esther Cohen (México DF: UNAM, 2016), pp. 209–218.

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Uwe Steiner, ‘The True Politician: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Political’, trans. by Colin Sample, New German Critique, 83 (2001), pp. 43–88. — ‘Von Bern nach Muri. Vier unveröffentlichte Briefe Walter Benjamins an Paul Häberlin im Kontext’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 75 (2001), pp. 463–490. Michael Taussig, ‘Tactility and Distraction’, Cultural Anthropology, 6:2 (1991), pp. 147–153. J. O. Urmson, The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1990). Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. by Annette Michelson, trans. by Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984). Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2010). Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. by Georgina Paul, Rachel McNicholl, and Jeremy Gaines (London: Psychology Press, 1996). Tobias Wilke, ‘Tacti(ca)lity Reclaimed: Benjamin’s Medium, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of the Senses’, Grey Room, 39 (2010), pp. 39–55. Irving Wohlfarth, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros: A Tentative Reading of “Zum Planetarium”’, in Perception and Experience in Modernity, ed. Helga Geyer-Ryan (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 65–109.

2.

Soviet Film: The Giant Laboratory of Technological Innervation Abstract This chapter analyses the two articles on Soviet film that Walter Benjamin wrote after his stay in Moscow: ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’ (1927) and ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’ (1927). These early texts on film are discussed in connection with ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939), for they anticipate the debate about film and the politicization of art discussed in the latter texts. This chapter also discusses Benjamin’s insights about the use and conception of technology in the Soviet Union, the different political groupings in the Soviet art scene, and his position in these debates. Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Soviet cinema; Dziga Vertov; Sergei M. Eisenstein; Battleship Potemkin; One-Sixth of the World.

The first two texts that Walter Benjamin wrote on film were published in the journal Die literarische Welt in March 1927. Both articles, entitled ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’ and ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, were written after Benjamin’s stay in Moscow from 9 December 1926 to 1 February 1927 and focussed on Soviet cinema.1 These texts analysed the situation of cinema in the first years of the Soviet Union and started to address some primary concerns regarding the technological nature of this 1 These two articles on Soviet film have often been overlooked, especially ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’. Howard Eiland’s and Michael W. Jennings’s biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life is an exception, given they read these two texts together and in relation to the ‘Work of Art’ essay. They argue that, in these two articles, Benjamin ‘outlines a film aesthetic that shares salient features with his theory of literary criticism’. Thus, Eiland and Jennings conceive Benjamin’s writings on film as ‘film aesthetic’, similar to my perspective. Their book does not, however, provide a detailed analysis of these or any other articles—as one expects from a biography. Hence, my analysis, which shares some fundamental points in their approach, will go into more detail. See Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, pp. 275–277.

Mourenza, D., Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462980174_ch02

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new art form alongside the politicization of aesthetics, anticipating many important themes of essays such as ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939). The reception of Soviet film in the Weimar Republic provoked varied responses, from those on the left and the right, from journalists, intellectuals, and film theorists.2 The terms of aesthetics and politics were the subject of intense debate, especially after the release of Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925), which premiered in a censored version in Berlin on 29 April 1926.3 One of the first reviews of the film came from Siegfried Kracauer, who published a passionately positive critique of the film. Kracauer declared that Potemkin showed ‘something fundamentally different’, ‘a moment of revolution’, achieved by means purely cinematographic.4 He argued that Eisenstein might ‘be the first to have used cinematic means to represent a reality’, since the film shows something ‘genuine’, from which ‘true content emerges’.5 The debate went on for months and Benjamin intervened at a relatively late stage. The discussion between Benjamin and Oscar A. H. Schmitz in a special number of Die literarische Welt about ‘The New Russia’ was published on 11 March 1927, nearly one year after the release of the film.6 Since 1925, the weekly literary journal Die literarische Welt, published by Rowohlt Verlag, had become Benjamin’s main platform for developing his journalistic work. He contributed regularly to this journal, publishing such 2 See Hansen, ‘“Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors”: Potemkin and German Film Theory’. 3 The film had first been banned by Berlin’s Film Censorship Office, although it was later approved in a shortened version by the Central Censorship Board on 10 April 1926. The film was banned again on 12 July 1926, because it undermined the principle of authority in the armed forces. Finally, the film was released again on 2 October 1926 as a new cut. 4 Kracauer, ‘The Klieg Lights Stay on: The Frankfurt Screening of Potemkin’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 May 1926; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Miriam Hansen, pp. 353–355. See also Hansen, ‘Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors’, pp. 172–173. 5 Ibid. 6 The same day, Kracauer published the first part of the collection of articles ‘The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies’, which Benjamin defined as a ‘political exposure’ as well as ‘sociological detection’ (Gesammelte Briefe, III, p. 248; cited in Leslie, Walter Benjamin, p. 82). In this article, Kracauer reviewed some popular films to prove the political exploitation of social critique by f ilm capital. The aim of these f ilms was, according to Kracauer, to safeguard the dominant society by exploiting the daydreams and wishes of society, always ensuring that any critique remained within the realms of the established order. Kracauer claimed that the excitement that Potemkin raised in Germany came precisely because this film showed the present in an historical guise, implying the destruction of the bourgeoisie, instead of reaffirming the status of the ruling class as both American and German films did (Kracauer, ‘The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, pp. 291–306).

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influential essays as ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), ‘On the Image of Proust’ (1929), ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), and a number of reviews of books, alongside these two articles of film criticism and the review of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928). The editor of the journal, Willy Haas—a screenwriter and film critic himself, who had acted as editor-in-chief for the Film-Kurier from 1920 to 19217—commissioned Benjamin to reply to an article written by the playwright and essayist Oscar A. H. Schmitz on Potemkin. This article criticized Eisenstein’s film for being marred by its political tendencies and by the film’s self-proclaimed status as a collective work. Benjamin had not seen the film before he left for Moscow. Haas, nevertheless, supposed that Benjamin’s response to the film would be a devastating critique of Schmitz’s stance, as indeed it proved to be. Benjamin’s article, under the heading of ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, provided not only a positive review of Battleship Potemkin, but also a defence of film as a collective medium which offered new possibilities to understand and represent the world. In the same issue of the journal, Benjamin also published the article ‘The Political Groupings of Russian Writers’, a text that analysed the different cultural groups that had been formed in the Soviet Union according to their relation to the state’s policy, their political stance, and their position in the contemporary aesthetic debates on content and form.

Benjamin in Moscow Benjamin went to Moscow in December 1926 to visit his lover Asja Lācis and stayed for nearly two months. In that time, he gained an overview of the new revolutionary Russia—which remained insuff icient for Lācis, who maintained that he did not know the country well enough, in part because he could not speak Russian.8 Benjamin found the situation in Russia contradictory and was disheartened by some aspects of the new state. He perceived that the Soviet state was pursuing peace both with imperialist states and within its own population, which led to the depoliticization of Russian lives as much as possible. At the same time, the young pioneers in the 7 See Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine, pp. 115 and 123–125. 8 Benjamin recognized that because of his ignorance of the Russian language, he was unable to approach more than a narrow slice of life. This restriction led him to focus less on a visual than a rhythmic experience of the country: ‘an experience in which an archaic Russian tempo blends into a whole with the new rhythms of the Revolution, an experience which, by Western standards, I discovered to be far more incommensurable than I had expected’ (letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal from 5 June 1927 [‘Moscow Diary’, p. 134]).

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Komsomol were educated in revolution not as experience, but as discourse. The times, for Benjamin, appeared more as a period of restoration rather than revolution.9 Lācis accused Benjamin of not understanding something essential about the Soviet Union: that a conversion was taking place from revolutionary to technological transformation. Lācis stated that it was made clear ‘to every communist that at this hour revolutionary work does not signify conflict or civil war, but rather electrification, canal construction, creation of factories’.10 Benjamin lamented, however, the absence of a more critical, but also utopian, approach to technology. He replied to Lācis with reference to Scheerbart, since ‘no other author had so clearly emphasized the revolutionary character of technological achievement’.11 Scheerbart’s vision of technology was particularly important for Benjamin. In his novels, Scheerbart depicted a successful interaction between technology and humanity. This relationship was achieved as technology had been put to humane ends; humanity had discarded the notion that the only role of technology was the exploitation of nature. In this way, Scheerbart understood that technology’s aim was to emancipate not only humans, but creation itself. During his stay in Moscow, Benjamin also mentioned Scheerbart in an interview for the daily evening newspaper Vecherniaia Moskva. In the interview, he discussed Italian art and German literature, placing special emphasis on Scheerbart and his conception of technology: His books are utopian-cosmological novels in which the problem of interplanetary relations is tracked down and humans are represented as the creators of an ideal technology. The novels are saturated with the pathos of technology, a pathos of machines that is entirely new and unaccustomed for literature, yet which is far from displaying social meaning, since Scheerbart’s heroes seek the harmony of the world and since the creation of machines is of importance for them not for economic reasons, but rather as the proof of certain ideal truths.12

For Benjamin, Scheerbart’s characters construct technology dissociated from the direct economic purposes to which it is commonly reduced. For him, technology should serve human beings in the search for ideal truths, as in the building of the Tower in the asteroid Pallas in Lesabéndio (1913). After the 9 Ibid., p. 53. 10 Ibid., p. 82. 11 Ibid. 12 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, VII:2, p. 880; cited in Steiner, ‘The True Politician’, pp. 75–76.

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interview, Bernhard Reich—Lācis’s partner—was worried about Benjamin’s answer regarding Scheerbart and told him that his expostulations had laid him open to attack.13 Benjamin also expressed doubt about his answers and the imprecise nature of their formulations, even though he did not regret mentioning Scheerbart.14 For Benjamin, the creatures of Lesabéndio could teach revolutionary Russians how to incorporate technology into their lives. Hence, Benjamin wanted to emphasize the (truly) revolutionary potential of technology, given that the reception of technology in the Soviet Union differed in many aspects from the one he advocated. In the two months that Benjamin was in Moscow, he frequented numerous cultural events, particularly theatre, given the influence of Lācis and Reich. Nonetheless, he had the chance to watch a few Russian films. As can be deduced from Benjamin’s first reactions to these films in his Moscow Diary, he did not appreciate many of them. As such, it is hard to argue that Benjamin’s positive remarks on the film medium are first and foremost directed at Soviet film, as many authors maintain. In fact, Benjamin wrote: ‘Russian film itself, apart from a few outstanding productions, is not all that good on the average.’15 In total, Benjamin saw seven films, most of them recently released, although he also saw a couple of films from the previous year. As a result of Reich’s acquaintance with Pansky, who worked for Gosfilm, Benjamin managed to watch a number of films in a press screening. The first projection took place on 16 December 1926. Benjamin expected to see Battleship Potemkin in order to write his rejoinder to Schmitz. The film, which was being shown to two American journalists, was coming to an end when Benjamin entered the room, so he only managed to see the final act. Eisenstein’s film was followed by Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926). Benjamin described the film as technically good but with an absurd plot.16 Based on Jack London’s short story ‘The Unexpected’, the plot is certainly simple, although one would find it interesting for Benjamin, since it resonates with many of the themes of his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), and explores to what extent citizens can internalize the state’s prerogative of violence. Benjamin wrote in his diary: ‘It is claimed that the anarchistic tendency of this film is directed against the right in general.’17 By the Law has become recognized as one of Kuleshov’s finest films and it is generally regarded as a critique of the institutions of bourgeois 13 Benjamin, ‘Moscow Diary’, p. 31. 14 Ibid., p. 86. 15 Ibid., p. 55. 16 Ibid., p. 28. 17 Ibid.

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justice, although Benjamin is right to stress a certain anarchistic tone in the film. Unfortunately, as with many other films, Benjamin did not develop his thoughts and the film goes unmentioned in his article on Soviet cinema. Two days later, on 18 December, Benjamin went to a cinema in the area of Red Gate with Reich. They went to see a film recommended by Pansky, who said the film ‘would outdo the success of Potemkin’.18 Benjamin, however, described it as ‘an unbearable botch’, projected ‘at such a dizzying speed that it was impossible to watch or understand’.19 Benjamin left the cinema with Reich before the film ended, but he does not mention the film’s title. Benjamin finally managed to see Battleship Potemkin on 24 January in another small screening room in Gosfilm. The screening was organized by a translator who helped him to understand the intertitles.20 The session included three films: the first one was Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (Mat, 1926), followed by Potemkin, and finally the detective comedy The Trial of the Three Million (Protsess o tryokh millionakh, dir. Yakov Protazanov, 1926). Benjamin professed favourable reviews for the first two films in the articles he wrote for Die literarische Welt, but he did not afford the same laudatory remarks to Protazanov’s comedy, starring Igor Ilyinsky, although he left the screening before the film came to an end. Benjamin saw a further film with Ilyinsky on 29 December in a cinema near his hotel. He described it as ‘terrible’.21 Although he did not mention the title, the film was probably The Tailor from Torzhok (Zakroyshchik iz Torzhka, 1925), also directed by Protazanov.22 In his diary, Benjamin described Ilyinsky as ‘an unscrupulous, inept imitator of Chaplin’.23 Such an attribution was probably based on this film, rather than on The Trial of the Three Million, since Ilyinsky’s character in The Tailor from Torzhok, a tailor assistant, dresses similarly to Chaplin. Although not a tramp, his suit, hat, moustache, and cane recall Chaplin’s accoutrements. Furthermore, Ilyinsky walks with a similar gait and the way he raises his hat with the cane clearly resembles the same gesture as Chaplin. 18 Ibid., p. 31. 19 Ibid., p. 32. 20 Ibid., p. 103. 21 Ibid., p. 52 22 Regarding release dates, it would be more plausible that the film was one of the three episodes of Miss Mend or The Adventures of the Three Reporters (dir. Boris Barnet and Fyodor Otsep, 1926). If we pay attention to Benjamin’s responses, however, it is unlikely that he was talking about this film, first of all, because the film could be better characterized as a spy film, rather than a comedy. If we add to this reason that The Trial of the Three Million is also not, strictly speaking, a comedy, Benjamin’s emphasis on Soviet comedies shows some incoherence. The second reason, which is also valid for the latter film, is that Ilyinsky is not the main character of this film. 23 Benjamin, ‘Moscow Diary’, p. 54.

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Owen Hatherley has argued that Benjamin was unfair to name Ilyinsky as a poor imitator of Chaplin.24 Benjamin was probably unaware that Ilyinsky acted during the 1920s in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theatre. Benjamin, however, had his reasons for his negative response to the actor: Ilyinsky’s histrionic gestures in this film are very different from the subtle gesticulation of Chaplin. His character does not play the role of an unlucky, innocent little fellow, as Chaplin’s tramp, but rather that of an ignorant country bumpkin. The other film that Benjamin saw during his stay in Moscow was Dziga Vertov’s One-Sixth of the World (Shestaya chast mira, 1926), which he saw alone—and, therefore, without anyone who could help him with the Russian intertitles—on 5 January 1927 at the Arbat Cinema. Benjamin acknowledged that ‘there was much that escaped me’.25 Nevertheless, after discussing it with Reich, he decided to give the film a central role in his article ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’. He had seen advertisements of the film days before its Moscow premiere on 31 December, as he wrote down in his 29 December diary entry: ‘A major propaganda film, One-Sixth of the World, has been announced.’26 Although Benjamin was unaware of Vertov’s career, he felt that the film was indicative of important trends in Soviet cinema. For that reason, Benjamin addressed it as a central production that was worth analysing in order to understand certain tendencies in the cultural panorama of the Soviet Union. As with other films, his analysis of One-Sixth of the World remains underdeveloped, at parts inaccurate or misdirected. Anyway, what his writings on Russian film show is that he never was, nor did he attempt to become, an expert on Soviet cinema. At no point does he seem to understand the differences in form and style of the most important Soviet directors of the time, whether Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov, or Eisenstein. It is also clear that, although he was not particularly persuaded by Soviet film—as well as by other cultural and political aspects of the Soviet Union—he preferred not to show hostility to them in public, reserving his more severe criticism for private discussions.

‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’ ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’ is particularly important for it presents not only Benjamin’s view of Soviet cinema, but also his reflections on 24 Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine, p. 72. 25 Benjamin, ‘Moscow Diary’, p. 69. 26 Ibid., p. 51.

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the reception of technology in the Soviet Union. Benjamin opens the article by analysing the production and reception of films in the country, pointing out that good foreign films are rarely seen in Russia because of their expense. With a dose of paternalism, he claims that the greatest achievements of Soviet film are easier to see in Berlin than in Moscow, because the standards of judgement in Russia are different to those in Germany, and Russians are largely uncritical of their own films. Benjamin is especially concerned with the films’ subject, since film censorship in the Soviet Union is especially strict on this issue. For him, the best Soviet films are those that deal with the October Revolution. However, Benjamin argues, the public is no longer attracted to this theme; the dominant subject, he laments, has become internal pacification. Benjamin also regrets the scarce, declining import of American slapstick in the Soviet Union, since he considers Russian comedies as ‘utterly irrelevant’ by European standards.27 He thought that Russians, given their passionate interest in technical matters, would enjoy slapstick because of its use of tools and props. These films, he argued, would produce a salutary, therapeutic function in these moments of rapid industrialization. The problem is, for Benjamin, that the new Russian does not appreciate ‘irony and scepticism in technical matters’.28 According to Benjamin, Bolshevik society required the success of a new social comedy, similar to that of Chaplin, in order to develop a healthier, alternative relationship to technology. Benjamin’s argument about American slapstick in the Soviet Union is largely inaccurate, though. Chaplin was largely known and admired in the Soviet Union, at least by intellectuals such as Viktor Schklovsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Meyerhold.29 All these authors understood Chaplin’s comedy in relation to technology, and, like Benjamin, conceived Chaplin’s body as a machine, his movements mechanized. For example, Rodchenko, in a poem written for the Constructivist film journal Kino-Fot in 1922, argues that Chaplin is able to transfer the machine into a human scale.30 However, in contrast to Benjamin, Chaplin was also depicted as the Soviet new man, between Lenin and Edison, between the lumpenproletariat and the Fordist subject. Meyerhold was a great admirer of Chaplin, especially of his early shorts and the Mack Sennett Keystone comedies. Chaplin’s ‘acrobatics’ and ‘tricks’ influenced Meyerhold’s biomechanics, 27 Benjamin, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, SW2, p. 12. 28 Ibid., p. 15. 29 See Hatherley’s Chapter ‘Constructing the Chaplin Machine: The Constructivist International Encounters the American Comedians’, in The Chaplin Machine, pp. 35–63. 30 See Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine, p. 44.

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which, as Hatherley maintains, represent a fusion between Taylorism and ‘Chaplinism’.31 In the Soviet Union, Chaplin had become associated with Taylorism—even if it sounds particularly strange to more contemporary viewers after his fierce critique of the Taylor system in Modern Times (1936). For Benjamin, on the contrary, Chaplin represented the opposite to Taylorism and Fordism, as I will show in Chapter 4, since his films acted as the antidote to the numbing of the senses caused by the scientific management of labour and its reliance on machines. In the article, Benjamin analyses Vertov’s film One-Sixth of the World, basing his critique on the film’s representation of the relationship of Russian people to their means of production. Benjamin opens his analysis by arguing that the film has failed to achieve its self-imposed challenge to depict how the vast regions of the Soviet Union have changed under the new social order. He describes the first minutes of the film as such: ‘in fractions of a second, there is a flow of images from workplaces (pistons in motion, labourers bringing in the harvest, transport works) and from capitalist places of entertainment (bars, dance halls, and clubs)’.32 These first images of the film succeed, because, with an accelerating montage, Vertov links the bourgeoisie and the accumulation of capital to the exploitation of workers. Vertov does this by displaying colonized subjects as slaves or as mere amusement for the bourgeoisie’s spectacle. For Benjamin, the relations, which are made through montage in these first minutes of film, succeed in their aim, but ‘the film soon abandons this approach in favour of a description of Russian peoples and landscapes, while the link between these and their modes of production is merely hinted at in an all too shadowy fashion’.33 The film becomes a vast geographical and cultural panorama of the new Soviet Union, documenting how various ethnic groups cultivate the land and how goods are transported via different means of transportation. As Benjamin wrote years later in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, film is a powerful means of materialist exposition, quoting Pudovkin: ‘to connect the performance of an actor with an object, and to build that performance around the object […] is always one of the most powerful methods of cinematic construction’.34 With the use of cinematic techniques, the relation between the actor and the material world could be revealed as never before. Hence, Benjamin would have expected to see the depiction of the relation of human beings 31 Ibid., p. 69. 32 Benjamin, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, SW2, p. 13. 33 Ibid. 34 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n126.

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to machinery in different modes of production and how this relationship had changed from Czarist Russia to the new, emerging Soviet society. For him, however, the film failed to establish this connection. The film was commissioned by the Central State Trading Organization with the goal of making the Soviet Foreign Trade Organization known abroad. Jacques Rancière argues that, nevertheless, in One-Sixth of the World, there are few images about the services of this organization or about the workers involved. Furthermore, the film shows dog sleds and caravans as a means of transportation as often as trains or cargo ships, something that undermines the aim of the film. And yet, says Rancière, the filmmaker succeeds given he depicts the country as ‘a real living body, a single organism’, of which this state agency is only an organ.35 Rancière notes another inconsistency inherent in Benjamin’s critique: that there is no proper distinction between capitalist machines and Soviet machines. The difference is only established in the relation between the declining old capitalist world and ‘its shadowy underbelly’,36 between the metropole and the colonies and the forced labour that sustains it. Benjamin, in fact, approved of the connection the film establishes between capitalist countries and their colonies. He rather criticizes the celebratory description of the different cultures and landscapes that form part of the newly founded Soviet Union. The relations of the depicted Soviet peoples to the means of production, as Rancière points out, does not differ from those in capitalist countries. Although the film clearly states in its intertitles that machines are now ‘YOURS’, the representation of technology and the use of machinery is certainly not emancipatory. The main point of the film is that the Soviet Union is now exporting products made in all places in the USSR, however remote they are, such as, for example, fur coats, which are later sold ‘in the land of capital’. This, according to Vertov, permits the Soviet Union to import machines—a big box with the Ford logo is shown, for instance—and ‘machines producing machines’. In this way, the Soviet Union can further their ‘own construction of machines’, and machines that produce more machines, such as tractors. The Soviet state will become, in this way, autonomous, independent from foreign production. All this, Vertov argues, helps to establish one socialist economy. Benjamin does not make any reference to Vertov’s praise for machines in the film, nor to his celebration of state capitalism. Nonetheless, his remarks about Russians not accepting ‘irony and scepticism in technical matters’37 may well be influenced by the tenor of this film. 35 Rancière, Aisthesis, p. 227. 36 Ibid., pp. 231–232. 37 Benjamin, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, SW2, p. 15.

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Advancing a theme of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin defines Vertov’s film as a typical attempt to make a film straight from life, in which the apparatus is masked when shooting amateur actors. He refers here to Vertov’s demand to catch life unaware, ‘in order to show people without masks, without makeup, to catch them through the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting, to read their thoughts, laid bare by the camera’.38 In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin repeats this idea, in what seems to be another reference to Vertov: ‘Some of the actors taking part in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves—and primarily in their own work process.’39 In ‘Little History of Photography’, Benjamin also mentions the same idea, although in a subsidiary manner, comparing ‘the tremendous physiognomic gallery mounted by an Eisenstein or a Pudovkin’ with the series of social types presented in the book Face of Our Time (1929) by the German photographer August Sander. 40 Benjamin recognizes that the Russian feature film was the first to put faces in front of the camera, which photography had hitherto not done. For Benjamin, ‘immediately the human face appeared on film with new and immeasurable significance’.41 Unlike classical portraiture, these faces did not claim to have a transparent meaning, representing the ego of the person portrayed. The significance of these faces remained elusive, but their meaning was open to new uses, Vertov’s films being a good example. In ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, Benjamin also mentions the new film Eisenstein was recording, The General Line (Staroye I novoye, 1929). When Benjamin was in Moscow, Eisenstein’s film was still in production, but Benjamin heard about it and reflected on its use of actors. Following the same line of argument, Benjamin points out that, in Russian film, ‘[d]irectors are not on the lookout for an actor who can play many roles, but opt instead for the characters needed in each particular instance’.42 For Benjamin, The General Line is such an example of a film that goes further with this principle, since the director, Eisenstein, ‘intends to dispense with actors altogether’. 43 In this film, Eisenstein did not use professional actors, but looked for the peasant characters amongst the Russian population. 44 Eisenstein felt that, 38 Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, p. 41. 39 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 114; italics in the original. 40 Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, SW2, p. 519. 41 Ibid., pp. 519–520. 42 Benjamin, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, SW2, p. 14. 43 Ibid. 44 In his history of Soviet film, Jay Leyda reflects on the immense casting operation for the film, which swept through the cities and villages of the Soviet Union in order to bring possible faces

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for the role of the film’s heroine, he could not hire a professional actress; none could milk a cow, plough, or drive a tractor. He ought to search for a person who could fit into the context of the film, what was coined ‘typage’. For Eisenstein, this term could be broadly understood as a face without make-up. More specifically, however, it means an approach to the events embraced by the content of the film in which the actors interfere as little as possible with the events related. 45 In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin quotes Rudolf Arnheim to argue that the best effects in film interpretation are achieved by ‘acting as little as possible’ or rather using the actors as ‘props’, chosen for their typicalness and introduced in the proper context.46 In the footnote to this quotation, Benjamin develops the idea by giving the example of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 1928).47 He notes that Dreyer spent months searching for the 40 actors who interpreted the Inquisitors’ tribunal, avoiding any resemblance in the age and physiognomy of the actors. 48 The argument that Benjamin develops in this example is, therefore, very similar to the concept of typage in Eisenstein. Later in the article, Benjamin stresses the function of film in the construction of the country and the spread of the politics promoted by the Central Committee. During his stay in Moscow, he realized how seriously the Soviet state had taken the task of uniting the whole population of the country with film technology. Benjamin defines this project of exposing all citizens to film and radio as ‘the most grandiose mass-psychological experiments ever undertaken in the gigantic laboratory that Russia has become’. 49 He values these experiments as particularly positive. Benjamin discusses here—without naming it as such—the process of ‘cinefication’ (kinofikatsiia) in the Soviet Union that began in the first half of the 1920s and to Eisenstein. It was not always easy to find the right face and, as was expected, the discovery of the most important face, that of the film’s heroine, took longer than any other, exceeding two months. Finally, they found Marfa Lapkina, an illiterate farm labourer who worked in a state farm at Konstantinovka. Nevertheless, when he first saw The General Line, Leyda notes, the faces in it gave him the impression of having been found ‘on the spot’, in the same places the film had been shot (Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, pp. 263–264). 45 Eisenstein, ‘Through Theatre to Cinema’, in Film Form, pp. 8–9. 46 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 112. 47 It is interesting to note, however, that Rudolf Arnheim was very critical of the way that Dreyer filmed the scenes in which the priests discuss with the maid. To animate the episodes, Dreyer decided to film the portraits with a variety shots and angles, in what Arnheim describes as ‘form for form’s sake’ (Arnheim, Film as Art, pp. 40–41). 48 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n126. 49 Benjamin, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, SW2, p. 14.

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aimed to build an infrastructure that would allow every town and village of the country to have access to cinema. ‘Cinefication’ was a neologism that was incorporated into early Soviet life alongside terms such as ‘electrification’ and ‘radiofication’ as ‘indications of how modern technology promised to transform the Russian experience’.50 In the article, Benjamin mentions the existence of cultural and educational films addressed to peasants. These films were produced in such a manner that the peasant population could understand them. Peasants were thus provided with historical, political, and technical information (such as how to deal with plagues or use tractors) and even with hygienic and behavioural advice. These films reached their audience through travelling cinemas, which arrived to even the remotest regions of the country. Although Benjamin noticed that much of this programme remained incomprehensible to the great majority, it could be useful as ‘training material’ for the peasant representatives. Thus, film was used as a medium through which the population of the Soviet Union could approach technology.51 Here, Benjamin’s interest in the experimental is clear, a playful interaction with technology employed in order to socially organize a new collective body. Benjamin, too, was aware that this body, in the case of the Soviet Union, corresponded to a national organization constructed by the State, and the brain that discharged the energy to innervate such a body was none other than the Central Committee. The incorporation of technology into the new social organization of the country, which was often referred to as an organism, was indeed strongly promoted by the Soviet State. The concept of ‘electrification’, which was accompanied by the State Commission for Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) plan, was a clear example of Lenin’s famous dictum: ‘Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.’ Such an adoption of technology was, however, hardly critical. Lenin advocated for the adoption of Taylorism as early as 1918, claiming that the Soviet Republic should 50 Kepley, ‘“Cinefication”: Soviet Film Exhibition in the 1920s’, p. 262. 51 In her book Visions of a New Land, Emma Widdis analyses this process of bringing cinema to all regions of the emerging state in order to integrate the population into a new concept of citizenship. She writes that, in 1925, local organizations under the association of the Society for Friends of Soviet Cinema were formed with the aim of providing cinematic equipment and mobile projectors to enrich the everyday life of the regions. As Benjamin notes in his article, peasants were important targets in this process of cinefication. In this regard, an issue of the official journal Soviet Cinema claimed that ‘the kinofikatsiia of the village [was] a key task for Soviet construction’. For the next fifteen years, the production of films made for peasants—among them the type of films that Benjamin talked about, on the use of tractors, the education to take care of animals hygienically, or health issues for the farmers—grew in the form of film series or cinematic experiments (Widdis, Visions of a New Land, pp. 13–16).

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apply ‘much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system’.52 A number of critiques were raised against this model in the early years of the Soviet Union. However, in 1921, a conference on Taylorism, the All-Russian Scientific Management Conference, was organized by Leon Trotsky and set the principles of the Scientific Organization of Labour in the country.53 The State also sponsored the technological experiments of a number of intellectuals, giving rise to the utopian technophilia of Aleksei Gastev and Platon Kerzhentsev, among others, which revolved around the dependence of technology on humanity and the dependence of humanity on technology. In this environment of enthusiasm for the potential of technology, Benjamin wrote in his Moscow Diary that ‘everything technical is sacred here, nothing is taken more earnestly than technique’.54 Benjamin lamented the uncritical reception of technology in the Soviet Union. Although he thought these masspsychological experiments were positive, he also observed the problems caused by such an uncritical adoption of technology by the Soviet state. Presumably, Benjamin expected to find in the Soviet Union an innervation of second technology into the proletariat. Second technology permitted a balanced relationship between human beings, nature, and technology, whereby the risk of human exploitation was reduced to a minimum. Benjamin characterized second technology as a technology distanced from the dynamic forces of nature and divorced from the capricious, religious fate associated with first technology, which escapes reason and whose effects cannot be controlled by human beings. Benjamin did perceive an attempt to innervate technology into all the layers of the population across the vast regions of the Soviet Union. Through film—especially with the educational f ilms which travelled in trains around the country—proletarians and 52 Lenin, ‘The Immediate Task of the Soviet Government’, p. 258. For Lenin, the Taylor system was the last word of capitalism in the organization of labour. He argued that, like all capitalist progress, Taylorism was a combination of bourgeois exploitation and great scientific achievements. According to him, the possibility of building socialism depended exactly on the ‘success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism’ (p. 259). Thus, Lenin claimed that studying and teaching the Taylor system should be organized in Russia in order to examine and adapt it to the objectives of the Soviet revolution. Trotsky’s ideas about Fordism were not very different. Writing in 1926, Trotsky argued that the socialist economy of the Soviet Union should adapt the ‘conveyor principle’ used by Ford. According to him, capitalism used the conveyor belt to perfect the exploitation of the worker. However, he claimed that ‘this use of the conveyor is connected with capitalism, not with the conveyor itself’. For this reason, Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union should not smash Fordism, but ‘separate Fordism from Ford and to socialize and purge it’ (Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life, pp. 299–301). 53 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 147. 54 Benjamin, ‘Moscow Diary’, pp. 54–55.

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peasants had the chance to adapt to technology in a more playful way than through their direct intercourse with machinery. In the conclusion of his text on Russian f ilm, Benjamin insinuates that Soviet f ilms had completed this process of technological innervation—even though he regrets the absence of an ironic and therapeutic view of technology as embodied by Chaplin. He laments, nonetheless, that dramatic and tragic treatments of love and death were excluded from Soviet film. Benjamin returns to this idea in the important footnote in the ‘Work of Art’ essay in which Benjamin develops the concept of ‘second technology’. He argues that, as soon as second technology ‘had secured its initial revolutionized gains’, the problems concerning the individual (e.g. questions of love and death) would come to the fore again.55 For Benjamin, therefore, questions regarding the individual and ‘first nature’ should again be addressed. In this case, Benjamin was concerned because films in Russia could not perform a critique of Soviet man. He thought that Soviet films should return the gaze to those primarily individual issues and thereby provide that critique, something which a good comedy would probably perform better than any other genre. This task, Benjamin highlights, should be carried out by the people, and not only by the state. For this reason, Benjamin claims that Bolshevik society would only be stable when it was able to create a new ‘social comedy’.56

‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’ The article ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’ is especially relevant for the discussion here as it begins to address some questions about the relationship between the technological nature of the medium and the content of the representation. It is also crucial in understanding the debates on aesthetics and politics which took place in Germany and the Soviet Union at the time, as well as in tracing Benjamin’s argument about technology and its relation to the production of art. In this article, Benjamin fiercely attacks the review that Schmitz wrote on Battleship Potemkin, branding the film as tendentious.57 For Benjamin, Schmitz’s article is a clear case of bourgeois critique, which tends to search for ‘beauty’ even when the artwork ‘speaks of the annihilation of his own 55 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n124. 56 Benjamin, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, SW2, p. 15. 57 Schmitz, ‘Potemkin and Tendentious Art’, Die literarische Welt, 11 March 1927, p. 7; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Alex H. Bush, p. 356.

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class’.58 Schmitz analyses the film according to the criterion that he would apply to a bourgeois novel of society. Indeed, he mentions novels such as John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921), Lewis Sinclair’s Babbit (1922), and Jakob Wasserman’s Laudin and His Family (1925) as better examples to criticize society, since they do so through the spirit of the individual. Benjamin argues that Schmitz does not understand the principle of the film medium. According to Benjamin, film is the first medium that makes the depiction of class movements in collective spaces possible, endowing the masses with an architectonic quality. For him, ‘[n]o other could reproduce this collective in motion. No other could convey such beauty or the currents of horror and panic it contains.’59 Benjamin refers to the scenes of the slaughter in the port of Odessa in Battleship Potemkin, as well as those of the massacre of the factory workers in Pudovkin’s Mother.60 As such, he argues that Soviet film has discovered that the depiction of collectives, especially in their emancipating battle, is a perfect theme for film representation. He also claims that the prismatic work made by film with regard to the physical environment—that is, the explosion and articulation of ‘second nature’ through the ‘optical unconscious’—is now used with regard to the human collective. In this way, the collective can better understand its own nature by disclosing and articulating itself and its relation to the material world. This argument is similar to the one Benjamin makes years later in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, in which he argues that film can fulfil the original and justified interest of the masses ‘in understanding themselves and therefore their class’.61 In his review of Potemkin, Schmitz argues that the self-proclaimed status of the film as a collective work is reason enough to be ‘banished from the realm not only of art but also of true human interest, for collective processes are subject to a mechanical causality that can be foreseen’.62 What is not foreseeable and, as a result, is artistically important for Schmitz are ‘individual matters’.63 With this, he equates humanity with the individual and refuses to accept that collectives can have any agency. For that reason, Schmitz considers the film to fail in its artistic pretensions, given only the individual can act freely and only in this way can viewers or readers sympathize with 58 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 18. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. Mother was enjoying great success in Germany at the time of the article’s publication. The editor of the journal, Willy Haas, wrote a review of the film published in the same issue of Die literarische Welt, p. 7. 61 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 115. 62 Schmitz, ‘Potemkin and Tendentious Art’, p. 356. 63 Ibid.

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them. Schmitz specifically attacks the social types depicted in the film, such as the captain, the petty officers, and the doctor. For him, the film should portray the individuals critically rather than focus on types. For example, he finds the representation of the captain as a sadistic oppressor reductive, instead of developing his individual character. Benjamin responds angrily to this argument, accusing it of abstruse determinism. For him, technological reproducibility created the possibility of bringing works of art to large audiences and, with it, the substitution of individual, elitist observation with a collective view. Potemkin is, according to Benjamin, a perfect example of how collective characters are particularly suited to cinematographic representation. Given Schmitz’s attempts to analyse the film as if it were a novel, he ignores the specificities of film as a medium. In doing so, Schmitz reduces his scope to the psychology of the individual. In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács shows that the structure of the novel, based on an individual protagonist who seeks meaning in his life, was conditioned by history and class. Lukács had, in this sense, already made a connection between genre and history, invoking the historicity of aesthetic forms. Building upon that argument, Benjamin criticizes Schmitz’s attempt to impose the features of the novel onto the film form, which finds a more valid expression in those Soviet films that depict collective characters. Despite this, Benjamin in no way suggests that the representation of individuals should be avoided; had he done so, the argument in the accompanying article on Soviet film calling for the appearance of films capable of providing a critique of Soviet man would be incoherent, as would his appraisal of Chaplin. All these points lead Schmitz to criticize the f ilm as Tendenzkunst, as tendentious art. The notion of Tendenzkunst came to the fore in the debates held at that time, particularly in the negative responses to Battleship Potemkin. Many reviews valued the film as a good work of art in artistic and technical terms, but saw it as marred by its political tendencies. A few years later, in 1932, György Lukács wrote the essay ‘Tendency or Partisanship’, in which he argues that the word ‘tendency’ (Tendenz) is highly relative, used in bourgeois literary theory to scorn artworks in which ‘its class basis and aim are hostile (in class terms) to the prevailing orientation’.64 In other words, one’s own tendency ‘is not a tendency at all, but only that of one’s opponent’.65 Lukács understands that the word ‘tendency’ has been taken up by proletarian literature as ‘a badge of honour’, but warns that it is theoretically incorrect. For him, this concept takes on the bourgeois 64 Lukács, ‘“Tendency” or Partisanship?’, p. 35. 65 Ibid.

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formulation of the problem and the bourgeois terminology, also embracing the bourgeois-eclectic contradictions involved in the very terms of the problem itself. Lukács argues that the term ‘tendency’ cannot be extricated from its origins in a bourgeois antithesis of ‘pure art’ and ‘tendency’. In this antithesis, any depiction of society was described as ‘tendentious’ and despised as ‘inartistic’ and ‘hostile-to-art’. In his defence of realism, Lukács claims that a depiction of objective reality must be carried out from within, by the proletariat, who, by not introducing any demands from without, did not have to face this ideological barrier. For him, then, ‘a correct dialectical depiction and literary portrayal of reality presupposes the partisanship of the writer’ for the proletarian class.66 Thus, Lukács opts for the term ‘partisanship’ (Parteilichkeit) instead of ‘tendency’. In ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, Benjamin challenges the concept of ‘tendency’ in a different way, by inserting technology into the pairing of aesthetics and politics. For Benjamin, technical revolutions, such as the invention of cinema, are fracture points in art history and make visible the political tendency that was already implicit in every work of art, that is, the relation of art to the conditions of production and the living context in which it emerges. The word that Benjamin uses in German is Technik, which means both technique and technology, and, furthermore, comprises social relations, unlike Technologie. According to Benjamin, with the appearance of new media, the political tendency is transformed and comes to the surface through the fractures of the new medium, passing ‘from a concealed element of art into a manifest one’.67 Social relations inherent to the very technology of the medium, such as the collective quality of both production and reception in cinema, are revealed. In ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934), Benjamin brings this conception of tendency to the debate and tries to overcome the opposition between ‘quality’ and ‘tendency’. The understanding of ‘tendency’ in this text is not far from the one identified by Lukács, but the role of technology/technique in terms of the relation of the author to the means of production gives the term a new, revolutionary nuance. Benjamin does not dismiss tendency, but criticizes many writers of the left who think that tendency is the only thing that matters. For that reason, Benjamin declares: ‘a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality’.68 This statement opposes a position defended by some Soviet writers, also becoming popular among French 66 Ibid., p. 43. 67 Ibid., p. 17. 68 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, p. 769.

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communists, which Benjamin had analysed in the aforementioned article ‘The Political Grouping of Russian Writers’. The All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers had debated the question of whether literary value should be determined by its revolutionary form or its revolutionary content, resolving eventually that, in the absence of a specific revolutionary form, revolutionary content was what mattered.69 Maria Gough, in her article about ‘The Author as Producer’, argues that, by calling for an artwork that presents both a correct political tendency and quality, Benjamin is asserting ‘the inextricability of the terms of the antithesis itself’.70 Furthermore, he not only argues that there is an interrelation between tendency and quality, but he also advocates for the precedence of technology over the two. In Benjamin’s film aesthetics, content and form should conform to the technological—and, hence, political—structure of film. The political tendency emerges from the relation that the film presupposes to its position as Technik.

Refunctioning the Medium In ‘The Author as Producer’, Benjamin addresses the position of the artist and of the work of art within its relations of production. What concerns Benjamin is not so much the attitude of the work of art to the relations of production, as its position within the literary relations of production of its time, what he calls the ‘literary technique of works’.71 Benjamin says that technique is ‘the concept that makes literary products accessible to an immediately social, and therefore materialist, analysis’.72 As Esther Leslie puts it, Benjamin wants to emphasize that ‘specific artworks are seen to exist not in a vacuum but within a socio-historical formation, “in living social connections”’.73 Technology continuously transforms these connections. In film, technique/technology (Technik) had revolutionized the relation of the masses to art. Technik, thus, had to be taken into account in any claim regarding the politics of art. Benjamin argued that the concept of technique ‘provides the dialectical starting point from which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed’ and, in a more deterministic fashion, that it ‘contains an indication of the correct determination of the 69 Benjamin, ‘The Political Grouping of Russian Writers’, SW2, p. 7. 70 Gough, ‘Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde’, p. 63. 71 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, p. 770. 72 Ibid. 73 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 99.

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relation between tendency and quality’.74 Benjamin seems to imply that technology itself tends towards specific uses. This deterministic argument was already present in his defence of Potemkin. There, when he poses the problem of the plot, he suggests that ‘the vital, fundamental advances in art are a matter neither of new content nor of new forms—the technological revolution takes precedence over both’.75 For Benjamin, most f ilms do not solve this problem, precisely because they still cling to the old media and to both the historical and technological conditions of representation. As such, these films fail to understand the potential opened up by the technological nature of film. Potemkin, which Benjamin assesses as ‘a great film, a rare achievement’,76 is an exception. In Benjamin’s view, those who criticize Potemkin as tendentious failed to understand the ideological and technical foundations of the film. As Benjamin recognizes, ‘there is plenty of bad tendentious art, including bad socialist tendentious art’.77 However, Potemkin succeeds both in showing a correct political tendency and an artistic quality. Benjamin means that the political tendency or partisanship emerges precisely through the technical nature of the medium, especially in its treatment of collective movements and the depiction of collective spaces. The artistic quality also emerges through the exploitation of the potential offered by the medium itself, without being too dependent on older media or conventions of genre. Kracauer expressed something similar in his review of Potemkin, highlighting the film’s ‘matter-of-course interaction between human beings and technology’.78 Unlike f ilms from the West, Kracauer argues, there is no segregation between humans and technology: ‘There is no gap between expressions of reverence and the application of technological skills. The people, who have the right relationship with the right cause, do not hesitate to put things in their proper place.’79 In his ‘Reply to Oscar A H Schmitz’, Benjamin rails against the understanding of new media according to conventions associated with older ones. In this case, Schmitz sought the same characteristics in film as he expected in the novel: the individual development of the hero. Benjamin, however, who understood the arrival of film historically, detected some specific possibilities that were opened up by the very technological nature of the 74 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, p. 770. 75 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 17. 76 Ibid., p. 19. 77 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 19. 78 Kracauer, ‘The Klieg Lights Stay on: The Frankfurt Screening of Potemkin’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 May 1926; reproduced in The Promise of Cinema, trans. Miriam Hansen, p. 354. 79 Ibid., pp. 354–355.

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medium. One of those artistic fractures that Benjamin discovered in film was the ‘optical unconscious’, a concept that he used to describe the new relationship between subject and object through the mediation of the camera. The transformation of the relation between the body of the collective, in the form of a cinema audience, and the space of their surroundings was, according to Benjamin, revolutionized, and this was brought about by the Technik of film. For this reason, in his ‘Reply to Oscar A H Schmitz’, Benjamin defines film as one of the most dramatic fractures in artistic formations. Advancing the concept of the ‘optical unconscious’, Benjamin argues that, due to its ‘prismatic’ work, film penetrates the tissue of reality and, eventually, explodes what he will later identify as second nature. The fragments of second nature can be arranged in new ways and articulate, in such a manner, the physical world, both human and spatial, so that this new nature can finally be understood by the collective. The optical unconscious was an example of the transformations that technology produced in art formations, and prevailed over content and form. The relationship between the audience and the world changes due to the technical nature of the medium, rather than the use of an avant-gardist form or revolutionary content. Nonetheless, Benjamin differentiates between a progressive and a regressive development of literary technique. For Benjamin, a progressive development aims to liberate the means of production in order to enable new relations of production and consumption. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin speaks of ‘the natural use of productive forces’.80 By productive forces, he means the labour force, both the proletariat and technology. For him, there is an affinity between the two, given technology should serve the proletariat to transform the relations of production. However, the capitalist conception of technology presses Technik towards a reversal of this conception and prevents technology from being put to humane ends. In this context, the natural development of technology develops automatically. Authors are asked, first of all, to consider themselves as producers. According to Benjamin, an author who aspires to create revolutionary art cannot feel solidarity with the proletariat only in their attitudes. Hence, the author must consider themselves a producer. Once the author has become a producer, they should recognize that ‘technical forces push towards restructuring relations of production’.81 Through artistic practices, the author-producer should channel that drive to compensate for, and ultimately overcome, the deficiencies in the social organization of technology. 80 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 121. 81 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 93.

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In ‘The Author as Producer’, Benjamin was concerned with the role of the intellectual in the class struggle. Through this lecture, he sought to make intellectuals reflect on what their position was with regard to the fight against fascism. Benjamin addressed the lecture, on the one hand, to many German intellectuals whom he blamed for the defeat of the intelligentsia in Germany and the rise of National Socialism and, on the other hand, to the French communists who were repeating the same mistakes that Benjamin had detected in Soviet Russia. Benjamin wanted to make his audience aware that they did not have effective control over their means of production. In other words, they were proletarianized. This was true in his own case. In a letter to Gershom Scholem from around that time, Benjamin described his communism as the expression of his own experiences. He defined his situation as that of ‘a man who is completely or almost completely deprived of any means of production to proclaim his right to them, both in this thinking and in his life’.82 The same holds true for Bertolt Brecht. The rise of fascism in Germany had dismantled his system of production, as he told Benjamin in a conversation in 1938: ‘They have proletarianized me, too. Not only have they robbed me of my house, my fishpond, and my car, but they’ve also stolen my stage and my audience.’83 Maria Gough argues that Benjamin, in ‘The Author as Producer’, was calling for a transformation in the arts which would overturn the pivotal dichotomies of bourgeois aesthetic experience, based on the division of labour, ‘namely, producer and consumer, performer and spectator, writer and reader, individual and collective’.84 These transformations would accomplish a progressive development of literary technique. The authorproducers should revolutionize their own division of intellectual labour as well as the role of the consumers, who should also become producers. In this way, Benjamin calls for a reconception of genres and forms according to Brecht’s functional transformation or refunctioning (Umfunktionierung). In this, Benjamin champions a transformation of the form through the example of the concert, which must fulfil two conditions: the elimination of the antithesis between performers and listeners, and that between technique and content.85 Benjamin finds an example of this transformation in the Soviet press, as he writes not only in ‘The Author as Producer’, but also in the ‘Work of Art’ essay.86 Readers are increasingly turned into writers, as 82 83 84 85 86

Letter to Gerhard Scholem, 6 May 1934 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 439). Benjamin, ‘Diary Entries, 1938’, SW3, pp. 337–338. Gough, ‘Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde’, pp. 70–71. Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, pp. 775–776. Ibid., pp. 771–772; ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 114.

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had happened since the end of the nineteenth century. However, in Western Europe, in opposition to the Soviet Union, newspapers belonged to capital. Writers in these countries had not rethought their relation to the means of production as in Russia, where the antithesis between writer and reader had been blurred as a result of a development in consciousness. Benjamin illustrates the figure of the author-producer with the Soviet writer Sergei Tretiakov, an artist who was able to commit his work to social struggle. For Benjamin, his ‘operating writing’ is the most tangible example of the interdependence between the correct political tendency—which could be better understood through the term ‘partisanship’—and a progressive literary tendency. Tretiakov stayed in the ‘Communist Lighthouse’ collective farm, or kolkhoz, several times between 1928 and 1930, and, instead of just informing his readers of what happened there, he intervened actively in the everyday activities of the farm. Benjamin stresses how the book that Tretiakov wrote after his three stays in the kolkhoz had a great influence on the further development of collective agriculture.87 Tretiakov belonged to the circle around the journals of the Left Front of the Arts, LEF and Novy LEF. Among other productivists, Tretiakov defended the use of factography or ‘literature of fact’ (literatura fakta). For them, documentary prose in the form of newspapers, diaries, travelogues, or memoirs worked better for their utilitarian contribution to Soviet life and the awakening of revolutionary commitment than traditional literary media such as the novel. Tretiakov exceeded his role as a reporter and became an operative writer who participated directly in the life of the kolkhoz, using photography in his operative work.88 He did not use the photographic apparatus simply as a recording device, but rather as a constructive tool with which he could turn peasants into kolkhoziv or collective farmers and contribute to the fulfilment of the First Five-Year Plan.89 Some film practices in the Soviet Union also invalidated, partially if not completely, the old antithesis that had governed art for centuries. Benjamin praised the use of amateur or nonprofessional actors as the transformation of viewers or citizens into performers or actors. The point made by Benjamin about people who play themselves in Vertov’s film is part of this transformation. For him, these practices could be considered operativist techniques with which to overcome bourgeois antitheses such as producer and consumer, actor and spectator, individual and collective. Feature films 87 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, pp. 770–771. 88 Ibid., pp. 772–773. 89 Gough, ‘Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse’, p. 174.

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such as Battleship Potemkin (or, by the same token, Strike [Stachka, 1925], October [Oktyabr, 1927], and The General Line) also depicted collectives instead of individuals, confronting the conventions of bourgeois art. In short, Benjamin thought that technology provided a new way of reformulating the division of labour in art. Through these operativist transformations—by which Benjamin is ‘exhorting critics to become photomontagists, authors to become critics, critics to become authors, practitioners to become theorists and theorists practitioners’90 —technology could finally be liberated from its subservience to the goals of first technology, the mastery of nature. For this reason, Benjamin strongly emphasizes the procedures of second technology, especially experimentation. Esther Leslie argues that this ‘experimentation plays a role in emancipating the means of production by acting as a training-ground in new modes of interaction between technologies and humans’.91 The goal of this operativist transformation is precisely to emancipate media such as film, photography, books, and concerts from their constrictive dependence on bourgeois practices, which prevent technology from reorganizing social relations. The politicization of aesthetics that Benjamin demands in both ‘The Author as Producer’ and in the ‘Work of Art’ essay is precisely this operative transformation of technique.

Groupings of Soviet Arts In the same edition of Die literarische Welt in which Benjamin published his two articles on Soviet film, he also wrote the article ‘The Political Groupings of Russian Writers’. In this text, he describes the different political groupings engendered among writers in the Soviet Union. Benjamin attempts to understand the nature of these groups, suggesting that the contemporary panorama of Russian literature can be understood better with statistics than with aesthetics, given its main function was to drag the entire Russian population under the political and cultural hegemony under construction.92 Benjamin analyses the main three groupings: the All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP), the Left Front of the Arts, and what he calls the Right Poputchiki (Right fellow travellers). In the texts analysed in this chapter, Benjamin defends artists who were part of the Left Front of the 90 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 94. 91 Ibid., p. 100. 92 Benjamin, ‘The Political Groupings of Russian Writers’, SW2, p. 9.

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Arts, such as Tretiakov or Eisenstein, and criticizes some positions defended by the VAPP. It could be argued, therefore, that Benjamin took a position within the different cultural groups. This position, however, was not always clear, and it took some time for him to take this step. In the third version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay from 1939, Benjamin added Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934), along with Joris Ivens and Henri Storck’s Borinage (Misère au Borinage, 1933), as examples to illustrate how everyone had the chance to become a movie extra.93 Borinage is a magnificent example of how film can be exploited in the interest of the masses ‘in understanding themselves and therefore their class’.94 The film follows the general strike in the mining area of Borinage in Belgium in 1932. It shows the workers’ poor living conditions and defends their right to strike, supporting their struggle, which is connected to similar episodes of struggle and repression in the workers’ movement worldwide. The introduction of Three Songs of Lenin does not add much to his argument, as it is not very different to the one made in ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’. It is, nonetheless, significant that, at this point, Benjamin decided to defend this member of the LEF overtly. Miriam Hansen has argued that, as Benjamin hoped this essay would be published in the journal Das Wort in Moscow, this inclusion may be understood as an act of solidarity with Vertov, who had been accused of formalism following Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929).95 Vertov was gradually ostracized from the Soviet film industry, and his plans and projects were increasingly rejected. He felt that the bureaucratization of the film industry under Stalin’s regime was subjecting filmmakers to the same roles and functions that the revolutionary project had set out to abolish.96 In the same vein as Hansen, Maria Gough suggests that the introduction of Tretiakov in ‘The Author as Producer’ is also a gesture of solidarity with another artist who had been moved away from the front line of Soviet artistic life because of his opposition to official socialist realism. By 1934, the year in which Benjamin wrote ‘The Author as Producer’, his operativist aesthetics had been rendered obsolete by both the party’s 1932 abolition of all individual cultural organizations and the ‘official endorsement […] of an exclusive aesthetic policy of socialist realism’.97 Stalin had condemned the avant-garde and especially Productivism by 1932. In 1937, 93 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (third version), SW4, p. 262. 94 This line, which illustrates the f ilm’s aim well, disappears from the third version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay. 95 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 87. 96 Michelson, ‘Introduction’, in Vertov, Kino-Eye, p. lx. 97 Gough, ‘Paris, Capital of the Avant-Garde’, p. 76.

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during the Great Purge, Stalin arrested and executed Tretiakov. Benjamin learnt of Tretiakov’s death months later, on 1 July 1938, through Brecht’s lover, the actress and writer Margarete Steffin.98 One could argue that, along with Hal Foster, Benjamin’s claim, made in 1934, came too late.99 The choice of Tretiakov as an example of political commitment and artistic quality might have been, however, a gesture with which to attack the position of the socialist-realist platform espoused not by the Soviet Union, but by the Institut pour l’étude du fascism in Paris. Hence, this would not be a belated gesture, but a gesture that, Miriam Gough argues, came ‘late, in time’.100 According to Gough, Benjamin’s claim was addressed to this group based in France and not to Soviet intellectuals, in order to correct what Benjamin understood as an erroneous position in the debates about art and politics.101 The political climate in Moscow was becoming increasingly repressive. The debates on aesthetics and politics held by the German émigrés were leading to the formation of strategic groupings and camarillas. The writings of what Brecht coined the ‘Moscow Clique’ (Johannes R. Becher, Andor Gábor, Alfred Kurella, and György Lukács) were becoming highly attached to the Stalinist party line.102 In 1938, Benjamin recorded in his diary how disturbing Kurella and Lukács’s attacks were for Brecht. Although Brecht supported Stalin until a relatively late stage, at that time, he was aware that, in the Soviet Union, there was a dictatorship over the proletariat.103 98 Benjamin, ‘Diary Entries, 1938’, SW3, p. 337. 99 Foster, The Return of the Real, n275. 100 Gough, ‘Paris, Capital of the Avant-Garde’, p. 83. 101 Ibid. 102 Part of these discussions can be found in the book Aesthetics and Politics. Ernst Bloch was a target of the attacks against expressionism, initiated by Lukács’s essay ‘The Greatness and the Decline of Expressionism’ (1934) in Internationale Literatur and followed, more aggressively, by an article written by Kurella in Das Wort. In this book, the confrontation between Bloch and Lukács can be found in the former’s article ‘Discussing Expressionism’ (1938) and the latter’s ‘Realism in the Balance’ (1938), both published in Das Wort. Some short texts that Brecht wrote as counterattacks against Lukács’s offensive are also published in Aesthetics and Politics, although they were never published in Das Wort—a journal for German intellectuals in exile published in Moscow, of which Brecht was co-editor, though without any real control of its policies. 103 Benjamin, ‘Diary Entries, 1938’, SW3, p. 340. In a letter from Soma Morgenstern to Gershom Scholem, Erdmut Wizisla found a description of one of the f irst encounters between Brecht and Benjamin at a dinner with other Berlin intellectuals around 1927. Morgenstern claims that they had a vehement discussion about Stalin and Trotsky. Brecht was entirely on Stalin’s side, whereas Benjamin defended Trotsky—although, according to Morgenstern, he did not look very interested in the whole business (Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, p. 28). Brecht’s position of unconditional support changed with time and, despite his reserved defence, he ended up criticizing Stalin. Benjamin was not surprised when Gretel Adorno wrote to him that she had heard rumours about Brecht refusing to sign an appeal for the glorification of Stalin.

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According to him, the country had been thrown back to a stage of historical development that was supposed to have been superseded: the monarchy. In Russia, said Brecht, ‘personal authority reigns supreme’.104 Nonetheless, Brecht claimed that, insofar as this dictatorship was reporting practical benefits to the proletariat, they should keep supporting it.105 Benjamin’s position was very similar. In a letter to Horkheimer from 3 August 1939, he argued that, ‘for the moment and with the gravest reservations’, he and Brecht still saw in the Soviet Union ‘the agent of our interests in a future war or in the postponement of such a war’, since its foreign policy was not dictated by imperialistic interests.106 For example, Benjamin disapproved of André Gide’s book Return from the USSR (1936) even before reading it, because he found it irresponsible to air his political position—critical of the state of affairs in the Soviet Union—unrestrictedly in public.107 Benjamin was aware that this support carried a very heavy cost, for ‘it demands sacrifices from us as payment, which erode especially those interests closest to us as producers’.108 For example, he had to endure—without public complaint—the attacks of Kurella in the pages of the German émigré journal published in Moscow, Internationale Literatur. An old acquaintance of his, Kurella accused his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities of being an attempt ‘to interpret Goethe’s basic attitude as Romantic and to declare that the “power of archaic instances”, a metaphysical fear in Goethe’s life, was the actual source of his greatness—an attempt that would do credit to Heidegger’.109 In a letter to Gretel Adorno from Brecht’s house in Denmark in 1938, Benjamin recognized how disturbed he was by this review. He described the publication and his characterization as a follower of Heidegger as ‘quite wretched’.110 Benjamin told her that, with Bloch and Brecht, he was trying to make sense of what was behind Soviet cultural politics, but it was agreed that the theoretical and political line taken in Moscow was ‘catastrophic for everything we have championed for twenty Benjamin said that he had been sure about what Brecht thought of Stalin since the summer of 1938 (Ibid., p. 64). 104 Benjamin, ‘Diary Entries, 1938’, SW3, p. 337. 105 Ibid., p. 340. 106 Letter to Max Horkheimer, 3 August 1939 (Tiedemann, ‘Historical Materialism or Political Materialism?’, p. 193). 107 Letter to Margarete Steff in, 12 December 1936 (Ibid., n208). After reading the book, his reviews were more positive and he found Gide’s insights about the role of religion in the Soviet Union to be valuable. 108 Letter to Horkheimer, 3 August 1939 (Ibid., p. 193). 109 Kurella, ‘Deutsche Romantik’, in Internationale Literatur, 6 (1938), pp. 113–128; cited in Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, p. 60. 110 Letter to Gretel Adorno, 20 July 1938 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 572).

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years’.111 As proof of these catastrophic consequences, Benjamin told her the news he had received some days before, that Tretiakov was probably no longer alive. In a nutshell, Brecht and Benjamin had no power or influence over cultural politics in Moscow. To the question of whether Brecht had friends in Moscow, he replied to Benjamin: ‘Actually, I have no friends there at all. And the Muscovites themselves don’t have any either—like the dead.’112 When Brecht qualified the Soviet state as a ‘worker’s monarchy’, Benjamin ‘drew an analogy between such an organism and the grotesque freaks of nature which, in the shape of horned fish or other monsters, are brought to light from out of the deep sea’.113 Benjamin’s longing for the creation of a collective body in the giant laboratory of the Soviet Union was shattered. Instead, as a consequence of the betrayal of the ideas that informed the revolution, a grotesque monster had risen. In the context of his anthropological materialism, Benjamin sought to find in art a space to accomplish the political task of successfully adapting technology into the social body. His call for the politicization of art aimed to transform the literary techniques of art forms in order to meet the purposes of a technology liberated from ritual functions before the innervation of the collective took place. The final goal, as in his politics, was to pursue happiness in bodily life. The articles that Benjamin wrote on the Russian cultural scene after his stay in Moscow are especially illuminating in this regard, as is his later essay ‘The Author as Producer’. According to the latter, it could be argued that the politicization Benjamin defended—apart from Brecht’s—was the one carried out by the LEF group. The defence of Tretiakov was a particular case of refunctioning or functional transformation of a genre which Benjamin valued as politically and aesthetically positive. Nonetheless, it cannot be argued that Benjamin was an unconditional supporter of this group. Some claims of the productivists—among them, Vertov and Tretiakov—were too uncritical in their praise of technology, occasionally defending exploitative practices in the name of technology and progress, to fall into technological determinism. For Benjamin, art should be understood historically, in connection with its living context. This context had changed its coordinates with the arrival of the technologies of reproduction. In the case of film, Benjamin considered that its political tendency was manifest in its technological basis, since social relations were inherent to the very nature of the medium. For an operativist use of 111 Ibid. 112 Benjamin, ‘Diary Entries, 1938’, SW3, p. 339. 113 Ibid., p. 340.

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film technology, artists should consider themselves as workers, using their technology of reproduction to show an improved relationship (of interplay) between the collective and (first and second) nature. Finally, those films which were technically good and politically appropriate should not disregard the next stage of the revolution, in which films should also address the vital concerns of the individual. This concern would be addressed by Benjamin as a good comedy that knew how to deal ironically with the relation of Soviet man to technology—in the same way as had happened in the United States with Charlie Chaplin. Nevertheless, before I proceed to analyse Chaplin, I will address, in the next chapter, Benjamin’s views on German cinema through a comparison that he drew in ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’ between Battleship Potemkin and the use of mass movements in UFA films.

Bibliography Rudolf Arnheim, Film As Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow Diary’, October, 35 (1985), pp. 9–135. — The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). — Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Briefe, ed. by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996–2000), III (1996). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), II (1999). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), III (2002). Ernst Bloch et. al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. and trans. by Ronald Taylor (London: NLB, 1977). Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Sergei M. Eisenstein, Film Form, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963). Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Maria Gough, ‘Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde’, October, 101 (2002), pp. 53–83. — ‘Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse’, October, 118 (2006), pp. 159–178.

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Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Miriam Hansen, ‘“Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors”: Potemkin and German Film Theory’, New German Critique, 95 (2005), pp. 162–179. Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde (London: Pluto Press, 2016). Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, eds., The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). Vance Kepley, Jr., ‘“Cinefication”: Soviet Film Exhibition in the 1920s’, Film History, 6 (1994), pp. 262–277. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1995). Vladimir I. Lenin, ‘The Immediate Task of the Soviet Government’, Collected Works, 45 vols. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1960–1970), XXVII (1965), pp. 235–277. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000). — Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983). Georg Lukács, ‘“Tendency” or Partisanship?’, in Essays on Realism, ed. by Rodney Livingstone (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), pp. 33–44. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. by Zakir Paul (London/New York: Verso, 2013). Uwe Steiner, ‘The True Politician: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Political’, trans. by Colin Sample, New German Critique, 83 (2001), pp. 43–88. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Historical Materialism or Political Materialism? An Interpretation of the Theses “On the Concept of History”’, trans. by Barton Byg, Jeremy Gaines, and Doris L. Jones, in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. by Gary Smith (Chicago/London: The Chicago University Press, 1989), pp. 75–209. Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia, with an intro. by George Novack (New York/ London: Pathfinder, 1973). Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. by Annette Michelson, trans. by Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984). Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003). Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Christine Shuttleworth (London: Libris, 2009).

3.

Film and the Aesthetics of German Fascism Abstract This chapter analyses Benjamin’s writings on German film. Through an analysis of ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (1930), it assesses to what extent the failed reception of technology in Germany had an impact on cinema. Drawing from Benjamin’s remarks on the masses, the chapter analyses the film Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927) as an example of the ‘architectonic quality’ that Benjamin detected in UFA productions during the Weimar Republic. The films by Leni Riefenstahl are analysed as an illustration of the corrupted representation of the masses performed by National Socialism. Finally, the chapter interprets the aestheticization of politics promoted by fascism from the point of view of Benjamin’s reconfiguration of aesthetics and the relationship between the historically constructed human nature and technology. Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Weimar Cinema; Ernst Jünger; Metropolis; mass ornament; UFA; Leni Riefenstahl.

Walter Benjamin never wrote extensively on German cinema. Among the different versions of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, he only mentions one German film, Frederick the Great (dir. Arzén von Cserépy, 1921–1923), in the earliest, handwritten text, as an example of a historical film, without providing any further details or analysis.1 In ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, the article in which he defends Battleship Potemkin, Benjamin makes a more valuable—although vague—remark about the films produced by the Universum Film AG, the major German film company better known as UFA. In that text, he criticizes the monumental quality of the representation of mass 1 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), p. 15. The four parts of Fridericus Rex are Sturm und Drang (1922), Vater und Sohn (1922), Sanssouci (1923), and Schicksalswende (1923).

Mourenza, D., Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462980174_ch03

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movements in these films in comparison to the architectonic quality of Battleship Potemkin. Despite these scarce and vague references to German cinema, the theses of the ‘Work of Art’ are largely intended to counteract the use of the film apparatus by fascism, and to analyse and reflect on the way that National Socialism was mobilizing film technology. Benjamin’s critique of the aestheticization of politics, which he develops in depth in this essay, must be traced back to his preoccupation with ‘the bungled [verunglückte] reception of technology’ in Germany.2 To extend this critique, it is necessary to analyse ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (1930) closely. In this essay, Benjamin introduces his critique of the aestheticization of politics within a broader critique of the doomed conception of technology adopted by the German right. With this, it is possible to situate Benjamin’s writings on film as part of his broader concerns with the uses and abuses of technology in Germany, both in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism. Benjamin revealed his fears about the failed reception of technology in Germany in numerous texts. In ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) and ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ (1936), Benjamin repeats almost verbatim a passage in which he talks about the traumatic effects of the First World War on soldiers and the civil population, which caused a rupture in historical experience. ‘Experience and Poverty’, though it mourns the loss of experience in 20th-century modernity, also perceives the positive side of such a loss, championing the rupture with tradition and hailing new forms of cultural production. ‘The Storyteller’ more clearly laments the demise of experience through the fallen ability to tell stories. For Benjamin, proverbs and tales were, for centuries, the best mechanism to pass on experience from generation to generation. However, for Benjamin, the teachings of older generations were no longer transmittable. Experience had fallen in value. This is first and foremost, Benjamin argues, because of the atrocious events of the First World War. Soldiers came back from the battlefield mute, ‘poorer in communicable experience’, unlike soldiers in previous wars, who recounted in song and story their heroic deeds.3 Experience, he suggests, has been disrupted not only on the battlefield, but also in the everyday, physical experience of civilians, whose long, vital experience (Erfahrung), acquired through the years and handed down from older generations, no longer held any value. Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent—not richer but poorer in communicable 2 3

Benjamin, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’, SW3, p. 266. Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 731.

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experience? What poured out in the flood of war books ten years later was anything but experience that can be shared orally. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been more thoroughly contradicted than strategic experience was belied by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on horsedrawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. 4

The human body is pictured in this quotation as tiny and fragile, amidst a field of destructions. Benjamin laments the capacity of the human body, the source of all experience, to respond to rapid and traumatic shifts. As part of his ‘anthropological materialism’, Benjamin explores the changes of the human body, and, more particularly, of the human sensorium, caused by a historical development of technology. In the bungled reception of technology, bodily experience has been negated by mechanical warfare. As he contends, many books on the experience of the soldiers in the war appeared in the years after the armed conflict. However, the experience addressed was short experience (Erlebnis), generally referred to as ‘experience in the front’ (Fronterlebnis), which could not be incorporated into long experience (Erfahrung). In the essay ‘Theories of German Fascism’, Benjamin vehemently attacks Krieg und Krieger (1930), a collection of essays in which warfare technology is understood in quasi-mystical terms and praised for its destructive and annihilating character. In contrast to these books, Benjamin found the Russian book Der Russe redet: Aufzeichnungen nach dem Stenogramm (1923), written by Sofja Fedortschenko, instructive. This book was a collection of pieces of conversations and stories told by Russian soldiers at the front, presented by the writer without any footnotes, dates, or names. Benjamin describes it as ‘the most candid and positive book the war has brought forth’.5 In his review of the book for Die literarische Welt in November 1926, Benjamin claims that the writer, by listening to the heart in the voices of these Russian soldiers, had succeeded in capturing the true face of war.6 4 Ibid. 5 Letter to Gerhard Scholem, 5 March 1926 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, pp. 294–295). 6 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, III, p. 49.

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‘Theories of German Fascism’ ‘Theories of German Fascism’ is a book review of Krieg und Krieger, a collection of essays edited by the essayist and novelist Ernst Jünger, one of the leading figures of the intellectual radical right in the Weimar Republic. Benjamin wrote this review for the social-democratic magazine Die Gesellschaft and, in it, he criticizes the collection for mystifying the vision of war and the experience of the front. Benjamin argues that technology was sufficiently developed to master the social forces of society. German society, however, did not prove mature enough to make use of technology as its organ. It was used instead for its destructive, cultic power.7 The most relevant essay of this collection was Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’. In that text, Jünger claims that, in the last war, the genius of war was penetrated by the spirit of progress for the first time. This progress, argues Jünger, cannot be understood merely as the product of reason, rather, it was spirit (Geist) that propelled that progress; for only a cultic power or belief could expand ‘the perspective of utility [Zweckmässigkeit] into the infinite’.8 Jünger draws his idea of ‘total mobilization’ in opposition to the ‘partial mobilization’ of past wars, which rested on the exclusive right of the monarchy to call for such mobilization and on the duty and the prerogative of professional soldiers. This responsibility, says Jünger, now lies in everyone able to bear arms. As the costs of waging war drastically increase, a fixed war budget is no longer sufficient. It is necessary to keep the machinery of the state and industry in motion and, thus, ‘the image of war as armed combat merges into the more extended image of a gigantic labor process [Arbeitsprozesses]’.9 Jünger claims that, apart from the army that fights on the battlefields, an army of labour would emerge with this ‘total mobilization’. As a distillation of the argument that Jünger would present two years later in his book Der Arbeiter, he argues that we no longer have wars of kings, knights, and citizens, but ‘wars of workers’.10 With the term ‘total mobilization’, Jünger seeks to translate the functioning of war into the social order. Workers would be like soldiers, ready to sacrifice themselves for a greater goal. Jünger conceives the deployment of technology in this mobilization in terms of energy—in a manner not very different from Benjamin’s concept of innervation. He views this mobilization as a conversion of life into energy, as an unlimited 7 8 9 10

Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, SW2, p. 312. Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, p. 124. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 128; italics in the original.

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marshalling of potential energies ‘that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life’s finest nerve’.11 Like Benjamin, Jünger conceives the reception of technology as an innervation into the body of society. However, the energy that Jünger plans to innervate into the collective is not a positive, therapeutic rush of energy; he rather wants to direct the release of energy in modern life into martial energy. If Jünger found something attractive in Soviet Russia, it was precisely the regularization and militarization of labour by the State: ‘the Russian “five‐year plan” presented the world with an attempt to channel the collective energies of a great empire into a single current’.12 Jünger praises the maxim of production for production’s sake, rather than the outcome of such production and its distribution. The same holds true for his glorification of war. He is not concerned with the ends for which the war is waged, but with the intrinsic and essentialist value of war as an end in itself. For this reason, Benjamin argues that this book transposes the principles of l’art pour l’art into the theatre of war.13 In fact, Jünger argues that wars are like cathedrals or pyramids, ‘possessing the special quality of “uselessness” [Zwecklosigkeit]’.14 As such, economic reasons are not sufficient to explain them; rather, he suggests, one should focus on phenomena of a cultic variety. Benjamin foresees, in this argument, the transformation of war into myth and the aestheticization of politics carried out by fascism, which he will later develop in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. War appears here as its own and only possible end.15 In the light of these ideas, Benjamin declares that we have a ‘last chance to correct the incapacity of peoples to order their relationships to one another in accord with the relationship they possess to nature through their technology’.16 If this effort fails, remarks Benjamin (anticipating the Second World War), ‘millions of human bodies will indeed inevitably be chopped to pieces and chewed up by iron and gas’.17 Benjamin clearly states that technology should be used to mediate the relationship between humanity and nature. The authors of the essays in Krieg und Krieger, however, approached technology as something mysterious, if not mystical. They failed to see that the goal of technology was precisely to help human beings. Benjamin understood technology as pertaining to the political, a sphere in 11 Ibid., p. 126. 12 Ibid., p. 127; italics in the original. 13 Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, SW2, p. 314. 14 Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, p. 129. 15 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, pp. 94–95. 16 Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, SW2, p. 320. 17 Ibid., pp. 320–321.

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which the happiness of humankind is the ultimate goal. As such, the telos of technology should be happiness. Benjamin argues that this mystification of nature influenced by Ludwig Klages—and here Benjamin attempts to distance himself from this author—fails to see ‘in technology not a fetish of doom but a key to happiness’.18 Jünger and company approached technology from its destructive side and saw the destruction and annihilation caused by technology as an end in itself. To recall an image from ‘To the Planetarium’ in One Way Street, Jünger would be the cane-wielder who thinks that the purpose of education is the mastery of children; by the same token, those who think that the purpose of technology is the mastery of nature and, consequently, also of human beings fall under the same instrumentalism. Benjamin defines this collection of essays as the theory of German fascism. Such theories, developed by these right-wing intellectuals, no doubt had an influence on National-Socialist ideas on technology and war. The NationalSocialist credo on technology was not coherent, however, and there were various positions on the role that technology should play in their political programme. Whereas National Socialism promoted the ideal return to a golden national past and to a communion between man and nature, many believed that this move should not represent a return to a pastoral epoch without machines. Rather, it should be a correlative of the modernization of the country that had adopted industry, trains, highways, and media. This position was primarily based on the writings of some conservative intellectuals from the Weimar period who have been labelled by Jeffrey Herf as ‘reactionary modernists’—Jünger being the leading member of this group. These thinkers argued for the compatibility of incorporating technology into German nationalism and claimed that technology was an organic part of German culture. Herf claimed that this current of thought was ‘a reconciliation between the antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism and the most obvious manifestation of means-ends rationality, that is, modern technology’.19 These thinkers had in mind a new, beautiful order in which Germany would turn from the chaotic state of capitalism into a united, technologically advanced country. German Romanticism and technology were thus combined, proposing a possible reconciliation between technology and spirit. Joseph Goebbels had labelled the epoch of National Socialism ‘steel-like Romanticism’ (stählernde Romantik) in a direct reference to this reconciliation.20 These thinkers wanted ‘the triumph 18 Ibid., p. 321. 19 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, p. 1. 20 Ibid, pp. 2–3.

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of spirit and will over reason and the subsequent fusion of this will to an aesthetic mode.’21 In their aesthetics, they promoted a fascination with war and violence as masculine values to counter the decadence and effemination of the bourgeoisie. By aestheticizing politics, they thought they would resolve this crisis of decadence and decline. This vision contributed to an irrational and nihilist embrace of technology by right-wing intellectuals, which was subsequently celebrated by National Socialism. The Nazi party clearly shared many of Jünger’s ideas. Nonetheless, when Goebbels tried to recruit Jünger, the offer was rejected, for the National Socialists were too plebeian for him. Jünger was too much of an elitist to take part in a mass movement.22 Benjamin detected in the idealistic language of these authors an attempt to redeem an idealistic nature through technology. Jeffrey Herf argues that the principal contribution of Benjamin’s article was to understand ‘that for Germany’s right-wing intellectuals, the “liberation” of technology from Weimar’s social and political restrictions was synonymous with recovery of the German soul’.23 Hence, Benjamin argued that the redemption of nature defended by Jünger and company was unmediated and mystical. For Benjamin, technology could give nature a voice and illuminate its mystery. In ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916), he describes nature as mute, speechless. However, this nature is permeated with the residue of the language of God: ‘soundlessly, in the mute magic of nature, the word of God shines forth’.24 The language of nature is nameless, but human beings are able to ascribe names through the communication they receive from nature—in the form of a speechless language. Benjamin illustrates the language of nature as the password that one sentry passes to the next in his own language. The meaning of this password, however, is the language of the sentry itself.25 When, in ‘Theories of German Fascism’, Benjamin returns to the same argument, he argues that technology can give nature a voice. This argument is similar to that which I presented in Chapter 1 with regard to the optical unconscious. Through the concept of the optical unconscious, Benjamin argues that technology can articulate the speech of second nature; in this argument, instead, he refers primarily to first nature. In both cases, though, the role of technology as a medium in this relationship is central. In his early theory of language, he had already 21 22 23 24 25

Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 32. Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, SW1, p. 69. Ibid., p. 74.

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indicated that, after the fall of man, every communication is mediated and the word must be conceived of as a medium.26 Through technological reproduction, the mediation of the apparatus, as a medium, is even more obvious. The authors reviewed in ‘Theories of German Fascism’, however, pursue an unmediated relation to nature and praise the heroic, destructive potential of technology vis-à-vis nature, which remains mute.

The Kunstspolitik of the ‘Work of Art’ Essay In a letter to Max Horkheimer, Benjamin defines the aim of the ‘Work of Art’ essay as follows: ‘These reflections attempt to give the questions raised by art theory a truly contemporary form: and indeed from the inside, avoiding any unmediated reference to politics.’27 Benjamin wanted to analyse the way in which politics had reached a point at which it could not be understood without the mediation of technology and, more specifically, of new technological apparatuses such as film and radio. Art, in its technological mediation, was immersed in politics. Any claim for unmediated and autonomous art was consequently regarded as suspicious. The ‘Work of Art’ essay aimed to provide a theoretical framework with which to fight the rise of fascism in Europe by understanding and unmasking its use of technology—and especially of film technology. Under the pressure of the Aktualität, Benjamin defined the tendencies of the development of art under contemporary conditions of production in order to contribute to the political struggle. In this case, he did not focus on the tendencies of art under the conditions of a proletarian seizure of power, as he did in the case of Russian art, but explored the uses and abuses of the technology of reproduction under fascism and capitalism. To that end, the theses sought to ‘neutralize a number of traditional concepts—such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism’.28 In this way, the essay aimed to unmask the use made by fascism of the technologies of reproduction by proving that those old concepts were no longer applicable to the new technological art forms. At the same time, Benjamin sought to refunction those practices for the purpose of human liberation. In the words of Esther Leslie, Benjamin’s 26 Ibid., p. 72. 27 Letter to Max Horkheimer, 16 October 1935 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 509; italics in the original). 28 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 101.

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contribution to Kunstspolitik, the politics of art, was to ground a strategy ‘for a political critical practice’ which would reinvent the relations of artistic production through a revolutionary approach to technology.29 In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin claims that technologies of reproduction revolutionized the social character of art through the destruction of notions of originality, eternity, or distance. In traditional art, the uniqueness of a work of art formed its aura: ‘A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.’30 Thus, the authority of such an artwork was always attached to the hic et nunc of the object. Benjamin argues that the embededness of the artwork in its own context of tradition, in its particular here and now, originally found expression in cult value. In this way, says Benjamin, ‘the artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function’.31 In reproducible art, however, authenticity ceases to be an artistic factor. Hence, ‘the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition’.32 For Benjamin, film is the most important agent for the shattering and liquidation of the value of tradition in cultural heritage. In the spirit of provocation, he claims that the great historical films, in their ‘celluloid resurrection’ of heroes, myths, and historical figures, are the most obvious examples of this ‘comprehensive liquidation’.33 In the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin names four such epic films: Cleopatra (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1934), Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ (dir. Fred Niblo, 1925), Napoleon (dir. Abel Gance, 1927), and Frederick the Great.34 It is ironic that Benjamin chose the latter film, which was commonly regarded as an example of the most right-wing tendencies of German film. Kracauer, for example, posited it as an exemplary case of the authoritarian trend in his history of Weimar film and described it as ‘pure propaganda for a restoration of the monarchy’.35 According to Kracauer, this epic film aimed to convince the audience that a patriarchal figure, embodied here as Frederick the Great, was the most effective antidote against socialism and a means to realize Germany’s nationalist aspirations.36 Benjamin seems to suggest, 29 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, pp. 132–133. 30 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, pp. 104–105. This is the definition of aura given in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. I will discuss other definitions of the concept below. 31 Ibid., p. 105; italics in the original. 32 Ibid., p. 104. 33 Ibid. 34 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), p. 15. 35 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 115. 36 Ibid., p. 116.

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nevertheless, that, despite the reactionary politics of the film, technological reproducibility would strip a figure like Frederick the Great of his aura.37 In ‘Benjamin’s Aura’ (2008), Miriam Hansen argues that, given the polemical conception of the term and Adorno’s influence, Benjamin ended up using aura as an aesthetic category, which is the most common understanding of the term. Benjamin did not, however, understand aura only in these terms.38 For example, in a definition from 1930, he argued that genuine aura appeared in all things, whether natural or artificial. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, nonetheless, Benjamin assimilates aura to the grammar of ‘beautiful semblance’ (schöner Schein). The singular status of the traditional work of art is thus conformed by its authority, authenticity, and unattainability. In a footnote in which Benjamin explains ‘beautiful semblance’ in reference to Goethe, he roots this concept in the age of auratic perception that he sees as coming to an end. Benjamin quotes a definition of beauty from his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities: ‘The beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil.’39 For him, this definition is the quintessence of the ancient aesthetic. 40 According to Hansen, ‘the veil defines both the condition of beauty and its essential unavailability’, that is, a symbolic integrity upon which Benjamin had already predicated 37 This point is similar to Benjamin’s argument that the aura surrounding Macbeth cannot be dissociated from the aura that, for the audience, surrounds the actor (‘Work of Art’ [second version], SW3, p. 112). For him, this observation proves that there is no facsimile of the aura. These two arguments, however, are at odds with the underlying supposition that both fascism and capitalism fabricate simulated auras. 38 In this essay, Hansen argues that there are at least two semantically different definitions of aura in Benjamin’s work: (1) from ‘Little History of Photography’ and the ‘Work of Art’ essay: ‘a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be’; and (2) from ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’: ‘aura understood as a form of perception that “invests” or endows a phenomenon with the “ability to look back at us”, to open its eyes or “lift its gaze.”’ These two definitions are conjoined in The Arcades Project when he invokes his ‘definition of aura as the distance of the gaze that awakens in the object looked at’ (‘Benjamin’s Aura’, pp. 339–340). Hansen also outlines a further definition of aura in one of his essays on hashish in which Benjamin describes three aspects: ‘First, genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine. Second, the aura undergoes changes, which can be quite fundamental, with every movement of the object whose aura it is. Third, genuine aura can in no sense be thought of as the spruced-up version of the magic rays beloved of spiritualists which we find depicted and described in vulgar works of mysticism. On the contrary, the distinctive feature of genuine aura is ornament, an ornamental halo [Umzirkung], in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case [Futteral]’ (p. 358). Hansen claims that aura’s epistemic structure appears reconceptualized and secularized in other concepts, such as ‘profane illumination’, ‘flânerie’, ‘mimetic faculty’, and ‘optical unconscious’ (p. 338). 39 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n127. 40 Benjamin, ‘The Significance of Beautiful Semblance’, SW3, p. 137.

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his definition of aura. 41 Benjamin assimilates aura in this definition to a fetishist cult of ‘beautiful semblance’—which is no longer possible in technologically reproducible art. It is only in this particular conception of aura, suggests Hansen, that Benjamin calls for its active demolition. In the discussion of actors and the polarity between play and semblance in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin claims that, with the emergence of film, art escaped the realm of ‘beautiful semblance’. The problem was that both fascism and capitalism tried to encapsulate a simulated aura for mass production, understood in relation to ‘beautiful semblance’. For that reason, as part of his Kunstspolitik, Benjamin attempted to identify the technologically enhanced fabrication of auratic effects in cinema in both capitalist and fascist productions, and in their reception. 42 Hence, he accused film capital—referring not only to Hollywood, but also to the UFA studio—of making a cult of the movie star, whose magic of celebrity ‘has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character’. 43 Benjamin criticizes the simulated aura created by capitalism in order to exploit the commodity value of film. Benjamin argues that this phantasmagoria is developed by the capitalistic publicity machine, placing the careers and love lives of the stars in public, organizing polls, and holding beauty contests. 44 Benjamin argues that there are two tendencies to every artwork: cult value and exhibition value. Historical changes produce shifts in the balance between the two. According to him, technologies of reproduction have produced an emancipation of the artwork from the service of ritual, increasing the possibilities for exhibition. Additionally, he claims that ‘authenticity’ ceases to be a criterion for artistic production. For these two reasons, the social function of art, no longer based on ritual, is now based on politics. 41 Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, p. 353. 42 In a letter to Werner Kraft, dated 28 October 1935, Benjamin writes with regard to the completion of the ‘Work of Art’ essay: ‘I am busy pointing my telescope through the bloody mist at a mirage of the nineteenth century that I am attempting to reproduce based on the characteristics it will manifest in a future state of the world, liberated from magic.’ Benjamin’s aim was clearly to dispel any vestige of ritual and magic that still endured in art (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 516). 43 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 112. 44 Ibid., p. 114. This argument is similar to Adorno’s in his critique of the ‘culture industry’. For Adorno, the culture industry ‘lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the material production of goods’. One of these extra-artistic techniques is the manufacture of the star system, which is borrowed from individualistic art and exploited for commercial purposes. In short, the culture industry, in the creation of stardom, blends the precision and rationalization of capitalism with an adapted romanticism—in the form of individualistic residues and sentimentality (‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in The Culture Industry, p. 101).

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In that regard, Benjamin criticizes some cases in classical film theory and contemporary film reviews in which commentators attribute elements of cult and supernatural significance to film, such as in the hyperbolic remarks of Abel Gance, who described cinema as the Gospel of tomorrow, or Franz Werfel’s review of Max Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), in which he claimed that film should give expression to the fairy-like and to the marvellous. 45 Though, in film, exhibition value prevails over cult value, Benjamin argues that the ritualistic basis of art is still present, even in the most profane cults of beauty. One of the responses to the advent of the technology of reproduction and its manifest political basis was the doctrine of l’art pour l’art. This teleology of art rejected any social function, turning the means (art), or rather the medium, into an end in itself. Thus, the authors who defended this doctrine sought to avoid the pre-eminently political nature of film by maintaining the bourgeois antithesis of pure art and tendentious art to situate themselves in the former. National Socialism exploited auratic features in the service of ritual. Through mass rallies and parades, Nazis created auratic effects on a grand scale in order to develop a corrupted cult of the masses. In a footnote, Benjamin describes how the aesthetics of Nazism were aimed at constructing an image of the masses in which they could see themselves reflected. He refers to this image more specifically as a face: ‘In great ceremonial processions, giant rallies and mass sporting events, and in war, all of which are now fed into the camera, the masses come face to face with themselves [sieht die Masse sich selbst ins Gesicht].’46 The masses are thus expected to identify themselves with this image, with this face, which becomes, as Richter argues, ‘the very locus of a Volk’s essence or identity’. 47 This image ‘promises them the possibility of identity and stability’. 48 This is, however, nothing other than a simulacrum, a fascist delusion, given it presupposes that the face, like the mass, becomes the bearer of a stable identity and subject born of a mimetic moment. Benjamin suggests that this image is principally created through the camera, especially in the production of newsreels: mass movements are more clearly apprehended by the camera than by the eye. A bird’s-eye view best captures assemblies of hundreds of thousands. 45 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 110. Gance’s remarks come from his essay ‘Le Temps de l’Image est venu!’, in which he describes film as ‘[é]vangile de demain’ (p. 102). 46 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n132. 47 Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 97. 48 Ibid.

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[…] This is to say that mass movements, and above all war, are a form of human behaviour especially suited to the camera. 49

Through the guidance of the camera, the Nazi mass rallies acquire an aesthetic, monumental quality. Benjamin recognizes that the aestheticization of politics undertaken by fascism was facilitated by the eye of the camera. Through film, fascism managed to structure the shapeless entity of the mass into a photogenic face, which was offered back to the masses for contemplation. As Léa Barbisan argues: ‘Fascinated and paralysed by its own image as by a caput medusae, the “compact mass” is drained of its revolutionary energy.’50 The argument about the masses’ face can also be explored in a related footnote to the ‘Work of Art’ essay, in which Benjamin presents the crisis of the democracies as a crisis in the conditions of the representation of politicians. With the appearance of technologies of reproduction such as film and radio, the politician is not only speaking in front of parliament, but to an unlimited number of members of the public. This historical change gives priority to the presentation of the politician in the media. In this way, politicians must acquire controllable and transferable skills to present themselves before the recording equipment. The politician, similar to the film actor, knows that he is speaking to an indefinite number of people, rather than to the members of parliament. At this point, the representation of politics goes into crisis, given it cannot follow the same parameters established by convention. The result, Benjamin concludes, is a new form of selection: a selection before the apparatus ‘from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors’.51 In their representation to the apparatus, indeed, the politician creates the face in which the masses should feel represented. Susan Buck-Morss argues that Hitler was aware of the importance of staging his performance in front of the camera and the masses. He practised facial expressions and, beginning in 1932, trained his voice under the direction of the opera singer Paul Devrient. The expressions Hitler practised in front of a mirror were, according to Buck-Morss, genuine expressions of an intact ego. In this way, they were reflective, reflecting the masses in Hitler’s persona.52 The historical, political role of film was to increase the number of people who could recognize the illusion of an intact, 49 50 51 52

Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n132. Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies’, p. 9. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n128. Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, p. 39.

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armoured ego in Hitler, as a promise against the fears of a fragmented body. The Nazis promoted an armoured body to fight against the fragmentation of modernity, exploiting an illusion of harmony. In the cult of the Führer, National Socialism wanted ‘to guarantee the stability and continuity of a single, highly aestheticized collective subject endowed with a determined meaning—the state, destiny, the Volk, “Germanness” itself’.53 The collective and technologically transformed physis proposed by Benjamin is radically opposed to the re-armoured body of National Socialism.54 Benjamin’s collective body is shapeless and without an ego. In this way, this body, which is neither subject nor object, cannot be synonymous with a stable identity. It is, instead, characterized by its elusiveness. Benjamin aimed to incorporate technology into the collective body in a non-destructive way, undoing the alienation of the body by passing through the very technologies that marked the impossibility of an unfragmented experience. National Socialism proposed, instead, an ascetic, annihilating experience of warfare as the only way to recover the unity of the body. The cult of Hitler thus came about through the myth of his persona as an intact ego. This myth, as we have seen, was conveyed in the staged mass meetings but was also more carefully performed through films. Benjamin outlined several ‘rights’ that the film apparatus was able to provide the masses: the ‘right’ to transform property relations, the ‘right’ to view cultural products that present an accurate vision of reality, and the ‘right’ to be filmed.55 National Socialism systematically distorted these rights and organized the newly proletarianized masses by giving them expression, while keeping property relations unchanged. In this way, as a result of the film apparatus, the Nazis gave an artistic (ritualistic) expression to the masses without conceding them rights. For this reason, Benjamin argues that fascism uses the new social opportunities opened up by the film apparatus in the interests of a property-owning minority. In this way, the illusionary displays organized in mass rallies and propaganda films are made to conceal unemployment, while involving the masses. In the end, property relations remain intact. Benjamin thus provided one of the most valuable understandings of fascism at that time, taking seriously not only economic relations, but also the use of technology for such purposes.56 For 53 Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 80. 54 Compare also with the ‘metalized body’ of Marinetti in his manifesto on the Ethiopian War. 55 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 163. 56 Many authors associated with the Frankfurt School also analysed the economic features of Nazism. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer understood Nazism as ‘State capitalism’. Franz Neumann disagreed, however, and said that State capitalism was a contradiction in terms. He

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Benjamin, the aestheticization of politics could only lead to war—the most authentic aesthetic pleasure for many right-wing German intellectuals. The economic and technological reasons behind total mobilization were that war enabled all technological resources and the labour force to transform without any alteration to the relations of private property. In another footnote to the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin provides an important insight into the masses, in which he introduces the relation of fascism and the petty-bourgeoisie. Adorno described this note as the best political commentary since Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917).57 Benjamin argues that, in the solidarity of the proletarian class struggle, ‘the dead undialectical opposition between individual and mass is abolished’.58 Whereas, among proletarians, there is the consciousness of a class, the petty-bourgeoisie forms only a compact mass. Therefore, the action of the proletarian cadre is mediated by a task and obeys a collective ratio, while the action of the petty-bourgeois mass is unmediated and reactive. The demonstrations of these compact masses, argues Benjamin, have a panicked quality, giving rein to war fever, hatred of Jews, and the instinct of self-preservation. The Nazis mobilized compact masses in which the antagonistic classes of proletariat and bourgeoisie were diluted, in order to give vent to the counterrevolutionary instincts of the bourgeoisie. According to Benjamin, National Socialism understood these laws and succeeded in instructing the masses with nationalism and racism through the promise of preserving private property relations. Therefore, although appealing for social change, the fascist critique never questioned the relations of ownership. Franz Neumann notes in his famous book Behemoth that Hitler abandoned, as early as 1928, the programme of expropriating property without indemnif ication in order to gain the support of the landed aristocracy—restricting it to Jewish real-estate corporations.59 As such, Nazism used the petty-bourgeoisie to take power by promising a solution to the crisis that would keep its properties intact.60 preferred to define the economics of the Nazi regime as ‘Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism’ (Jay, ‘The Institut’s Analysis of Nazism’, in his The Dialectical Imagination, pp. 143–172). 57 Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 18 March 1936 (The Complete Correspondence, pp. 132–133). 58 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n129. 59 Neumann, Behemoth, p. 229. 60 Ibid., p. 280. Neumann argues that National Socialism could have used the state apparatuses to nationalize at least the new industries. However, National Socialism eventually opted to give financial help to long-established monopolies. In fact, National Socialism always lauded the big German entrepreneurs such as Alfred Krupp, Werner Siemens, and August Thyssen.

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The Monumental Quality of Mass Movements in UFA In his ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, Benjamin draws a distinction between the representation of mass movements in the f ilms of the UFA studio, which grant the masses a monumental quality, and the ‘architectonic quality’ of the mass movements in Potemkin. The architectonic character of Eisenstein’s f ilm is achieved by articulating collective movements in collective milieus through the penetration and mediation of f ilm technology; whereas the monumental quality of UFA productions lies in its ornamental condition.61 Benjamin views the representation of mass movements in Potemkin as positive, because the undialectical relation between individual and collective is surpassed. The individuals depicted by Eisenstein act collectively and, through the explosion of the space brought about by the penetration of the apparatus, can better understand both the collective spaces in which they live and themselves as a class. The collective action here does not take away agency from individuals, rather it reinforces class consciousness in the fight for social liberation. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin claims that the masses have an original and justif ied interest in f ilm: ‘an interest in understanding themselves and therefore their class’.62 In contrast, film capital and fascism corrupt and distort this interest. This occurs when, in some UFA productions, the monumental quality of these mass movements acquires the significance of a compact mass, and the ornamental aesthetics of these formations become an end in themselves. Benjamin does not disclose the specific films from the UFA studios he references. Nonetheless, Siegfried Kracauer, in his famous book on Weimar cinema From Caligari to Hitler (1947), detects a similar problem in two films by Fritz Lang made for the UFA: Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927). In these films, Kracauer criticizes the monumental excesses of Lang in the creation of mass ornaments, anticipating the same patterns that Nazi propaganda films would exploit a few years later. The representation of the masses in either of these two films could have been said to portray a ‘monumental quality’ and therefore could have been in Benjamin’s mind when he composed his argument. Indeed, it is likely that Benjamin was talking about Metropolis when he wrote the article. In ‘Moscow Diary’, Benjamin mentions a conversation with Bernhard Reich about the poor reception of the film among intellectuals: 61 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 18. 62 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 115.

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We talked about Metropolis and its poor reception in Berlin, at least among the intellectuals. Reich laid the responsibility for this failed experiment squarely on the shoulders of those intellectuals whose exaggerated expectations prompted these kinds of hazardous enterprises. I disagreed.63

Benjamin and Reich could only have known the film through reviews, since Metropolis was premiered at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo cinema in Berlin on 10 January 1927, when Benjamin was already in Moscow. This conversation took place on 28 January, only a few days after the film’s release. Benjamin, however, might have seen the film when he went back to Berlin on 1 February and before he submitted the article for publication, given the article was published on 11 March. Apart from these lines, however, Benjamin never wrote any review of the film. In any case, if one pays attention to the dates and assesses the films which may have concerned Benjamin at that time, it is likely that, in his article about Potemkin, he was referring to Metropolis. The concept of the ‘mass ornament’ was first used by Kracauer to refer to American entertainment spectacles such as the Tiller Girls.64 These dancers, who formed geometrical figures in their performances, were relayed by Kracauer as the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the capitalist system aspires. As such, in these patterns, the girls are not considered as individuals, but as an indissoluble cluster of geometric precision in which the ornament is an end in itself. The bearer of the ornament is furthermore the mass and not the people (Volk). Although Kracauer conducted this analysis with regard to a capitalist mode of production, which sought after rationality and abstraction, it can be readily applied to the Nazi mass rallies. In these rallies, individuals were asked to submit themselves to higher ideals: community, nation, and, ultimately, war. Although National Socialism praised irrationality over the rationality of capitalism, the ornament of their aestheticization of life functioned as an end in itself in the same manner as the American entertainment shows analysed by Kracauer. Indeed, the geometrical perfection of the Nazi mass rallies was absolutely rational. When Kracauer uses the term ‘mass ornament’ with regard to Lang’s Die Nibelungen, he stresses the authority which is expressed in such an arrangement. The vassals and slaves which form these ornaments in the film are arranged in order to denote omnipotence and give the impression of the irresistible power of destiny. According to Kracauer, these patterns would be copied in the Nazi organization of the masses, creating enormous 63 Benjamin, ‘Moscow Diary’, p. 108. 64 Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, in The Mass Ornament, pp. 75–86.

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ornaments consisting of hundreds of thousands of particles. He cites Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935) as a visual product which draws inspiration from Lang’s film in order to show the mass ornaments as symbols of an absolute power.65 Thomas Elsaesser has argued that Benjamin’s interpretation of the masses in the ‘Work of Art’ essay was indebted to Kracauer’s analysis of the ‘mass ornament’ from the late 1920s. He claims, however, that Benjamin’s argument is more far-sighted than Kracauer’s. Whereas Benjamin is able to sketch in the uses of film made by capitalism and fascism ‘both the counter-revolutionary function and the sources of pleasure associated with the new visual and aural media’, Kracauer does not analyse the consequences of technological reproduction and thus pays too little attention to technological mediation.66 The representation of the masses in Metropolis can be defined as portraying a ‘monumental quality’. In the film, the city acts as an allegorical image of a contemporary city projected into a timeless future, inspired by the skyline of Manhattan. The critique of the precarious condition of the working class is a critique of Taylorist scientific management and Fordist mass production. Though there is an awareness of class difference—emphasized in the division between the city of the blue-collar workers below and the white-collar workers and masters above—this awareness of class difference and exploitation is nonetheless resolved through the motto that appears throughout the film: ‘The mediator between head and hands 65 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 94–95. 66 Elsaesser, ‘Cinema: The Irresponsible Signifier or “The Gamble with History”’, p. 87. Kracauer’s methodology in From Caligari to Hitler has been strongly criticized. For example, Leonardo Quaresima, in his Introduction to the 2004 edition of the book, criticizes Kracauer’s choice of a socio-psychological perspective for his analysis, because, according to him, it led to simplification and to the neglect of important aspects of individual films. Quaresima also criticizes the fact that, although the perspective is useful to interpret film as a symptom of the political and social situation, Kracauer does not define or develop the methodology he uses (Quaresima, ‘Rereading Kracauer’). Stephen Brockman, on the other hand, has suggested that, although the criticisms of Kracauer’s method are justified, both for his teleology and for his bold claims about film as the mirror of the German soul, his approach still offers an effective tool of enquiry with which to understand Weimar cinema and its significance (Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, p. 3). The socio-psychological perspective—manifest in the unfortunate subtitle of the book ‘A Psychological History of the German Film’—is ambiguous and is not given a coherent explanation. Kracauer presents a connection between his psychological analysis and the social psychology of Erich Fromm, but the psychological methodology that is drafted in the Introduction is irremediably lost in the text. Gertrud Koch argues that the theoretical argument of Kracauer is that films are ‘cultural symbols in which the subjective characters that are developed function as markers for the collective identity’. Thus, she describes his approach as a social psychology with roots in a cultural anthropology (Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, p. 80).

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must be the heart.’ The reconciliation of workers and masters is performed through the good-hearted Freder, who is none other than the son of the master of the city. The Christ-like prophet Maria foresees the arrival of a Messiah—eventually Freder—who must carry out the announced task of mediation between labour and capital. It is only after this call that the exploited masses react, following the plans of a leader, rather than acting independently. Furthermore, Maria does not question the division of labour or inherent power relations, but, instead, claims the only problem to be one of communication. The city-state is understood as a human body, an organic entity in which workers are conceived of as ‘hands’ and planners as ‘brains’. However, the workers do not understand the noble motives of the planners while the architects have no awareness of the suffering of the workers.67 The solution, according to the prophet Maria, comes about through the mutual understanding of both classes, but not through changing power relations. As we can see, the solution to exploitation is not resolved by changing existing property relations, but through the reconciliation of labour and capital. This reconciliation comes about through the mediation of the heart, understood as the spirit. By placing a spirit as the point of relation between labour and capital—whose relations are established through the means of production, i.e. the technology of production—any problems derived from capitalism are resolved. This was certainly the position defended by fascism. In ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934), Benjamin presents a dichotomy in the relation of both fascism and communism to capitalism and its own crisis: The spirit that holds forth in the name of fascism must disappear. The spirit that, in opposing it, trusts in its own miraculous powers will disappear. For the revolutionary struggle is not between capitalism and spirit; it is between capitalism and the proletariat.68

Fascism takes aim at both capitalism and socialism, because they both lack a spirit, a Geist. For this reason, Benjamin denounces the spiritual terms of the fascist critique of capitalism. Hence, he claims that a spiritual struggle against capitalism does not change property relations. The struggle must be, therefore, between capitalism and the proletariat. Metropolis, in this sense, can be considered a visual exemplification of the organization of the proletarianized masses by fascistic forces. According to Benjamin, fascism grants the masses expression without granting them 67 Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, p. 57. 68 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, p. 780; italics in the original.

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rights: ‘The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged.’69 This is the basic moral of the film. The masses of enslaved workers agree with the final reconciliation, in which they achieve harmony through the balanced communication between capital and labour. Lang grants them expression through a monumental aesthetics, but not agency. The enslaved workers form ornamental patterns that, though pleasurable to the eye, reduce the individual to a decorated mass. Although these patterns represent the working class, the pompous ornaments aestheticize a rebellion that brings about the establishment of a totalitarian authority.70 In contrast to the representation of the masses made in Potemkin, in Metropolis, we have a compact mass that reacts to the naïve, populist slogans of a prophet. The mass does not act following a collective ratio that would lead individuals to liberation. There is no real class consciousness, even though class differences are obvious. This fact permits Freder to sympathize with the masses easily, without feeling the need to become part of the movement. Tom Gunning has argued that Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou understood technology as a form of magic. In this sense, technology is endowed with a demonic power capable of creation and destruction. For example, the creation of the robot to replace Maria is done by imagistic and metaphorical means, rather than by technological ones.71 The Moloch machine is presented as a fearful creature that requires the sacrifice of human beings. Although the film also displays an enthusiasm for technological innovation, it does not present a scenario whereby the enslaved workers might make technology their ally. Technology is forever presented as something mysterious, unpredictable, to be feared. Lang seeks a possible reconciliation between a modernized society and the old spirit of the German nation, represented in the scenery by the two anachronistic Gothic buildings, the inventor Rotwang’s house and the cathedral. There is a tension between the Gothic elements and modernity. The clash is resolved through the rational ends of technology, but technology does not demystify this spirit. The use of technology is not presented as responding to the purposes of a class, but rather as a mythical and fearful force. This technology is, in short, first technology. As such, it exists only with ritual and culminates in human 69 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 121; italics in the original. 70 This is how Kracauer reads the final reconciliation between the boss, Joh Fredersen, and a privileged representative of the workers, the foreman of the Heart Machine, Grot (From Caligari to Hitler, p. 164). 71 Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, pp. 65–67.

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sacrifice. The industrial machinery, equated in this film with Moloch (an ancient Semitic god who must be honoured by human sacrifices), is the epitome of this conception of technology.

Seriousness, Beautiful Semblance, and Cult The ‘Work of Art’ essay has often been used to analyse the films of Leni Riefenstahl as examples of the aestheticization of politics.72 However, Benjamin never mentioned any film by Riefenstahl and probably never saw one. Triumph of the Will premiered in Germany in 1935, but it was not shown in Paris, where Benjamin was living at that time, until the 1937 Universal Exposition, later than the first two versions of the ‘Work of Art’ essay. There, the film was awarded the Diplome de Grand Prix. Whether Benjamin ever saw the film, however, does not diminish such analyses. In fact, the ‘Work of Art’ essay offers invaluable tools with which to criticize and counteract the use of film technology mobilized by fascist aesthetics. Leni Riefenstahl was a fervent supporter of art for art’s sake and used this argument to absolve herself of her role within National Socialism in the long debates that surrounded her work in the aftermath of the Second World War.73 Through this theology of art, she rejected any social function 72 From the point of view of Benjamin’s ideas about fascism, see Richter’s article ‘Face-Off’ and the f irst chapter of his book, ‘Benjamin’s Face: Defacing Fascism’, in Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography; for a focus on Riefenstahl and the questions that arise from her work, see Schulte-Sasse, ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic’. Both authors address the question of the aestheticization of politics carried out by fascism and theorized by Benjamin. Although Richter does not focus only on Riefenstahl, she is analysed as representing the faces of the Volk with ‘the illusionary perfection of a beautiful and politically eroticized Aryan countenance’ (Richter, ‘Face-Off’, p. 420). For a broader analysis of Leni Riefenstahl, nevertheless informed by Benjamin, see Leslie, ‘Leni and Walt: DeutschAmerikanische Freundschaft’, in Hollywood Flatlands, pp. 123–157. Lutz Peter Koepnick has analysed in depth the aesthetics of fascism theorized by Benjamin in his book Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power. He defines the aestheticization of politics detected by Benjamin ‘as both at once a fallacious strategy of transgression and as a false and ideological insistence on political autonomy and differentiation under the condition of modern industrial culture’ (p. 31). Koepnick laments that Benjamin’s comments on visual culture under fascist rule disregard the role of entertainment film and focus, instead, only on propaganda films à la Leni Riefenstahl, although, ‘strangely enough’, Benjamin does not mention her name at all. Nonetheless, Koepnick takes Riefenstahl as an example for his analysis of fascist cinematography and fascist aesthetics in general. 73 In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a revaluation of Riefenstahl by auteurists in the United States, Great Britain, France, and, later, in Germany. Susan Sontag severely criticized these attempts to redeem the figure of Riefenstahl in her article ‘Fascinating Fascism’. Riefenstahl

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in her work. This is the reason why Riefenstahl presented herself through the romantic figure of the artist, devoted to capturing beauty and harmony as aesthetic categories, and as a naïve woman whose artistic practice was utilized for political ends. Riefenstahl’s defence is, in fact, not very different from the political discourse of National Socialism, since both draw from the rhetoric of late romantic art. The political task of National Socialism was similarly conceived of as an artistic deed, notable in the words of Goebbels: ‘we who shape modern German policy feel ourselves to be artists […] the task of art and the artist [being] to form, to give shape, to remove the diseased and create freedom for the healthy.’74 Riefenstahl—who always claimed to be at odds with Goebbels—espoused a similar approach to art and life: ‘Whatever is purely realistic, slice-of-life, which is average, quotidian, doesn’t interest me […] I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, by what is living. I seek harmony.’75 It could be argued that Riefenstahl only pursued beauty in works of art as a spiritual escape from reality. Her work, however, can be defined as the mobilization of film technology for the purpose of breaking down the boundaries between art and life. Riefenstahl started her career in film as an actress with the director Arnold Fanck in his Bergfilme or ‘mountain films’, a genre which has often been associated with a pre-fascist sentiment. The first film she directed, The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht, 1932), was highly influenced by this genre, and, herself took part in her revaluation by publishing her memoirs, The Sieve of Time, in 1987 and participating in the more ambiguous documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl, dir. Ray Müller, 1993). More critically, although still with the aim of recovering the artistic quality of Riefenstahl’s films, Eric Rentschler and Linda Schulte-Sasse have also revalued her work in the following articles: Rentschler, ‘Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light’ and Schulte-Sasse’s ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic’. 74 Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, p. 92. Goebbels makes a similar comparison between art and politics in his semi-autobiographical novel, Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form (1929): ‘The statesman is an artist, too. The people are for him what stone is for the sculptor. Leader and masses are as little of a problem to each other as color is a problem for the painter. Politics are the plastic arts of the state as painting is the plastic art of color.’ Paul de Man, in his polemics against Schiller, brings out this quote to criticize Schiller’s metaphorization. He accuses Schiller of basing his defence of an aesthetic state on a misreading of Kant’s philosophy. The problem, argues De Man, is that liberal education has been influenced by this idea. Schiller defended the popularization of aesthetics and, thus, the State appropriated it. At the end, De Man argues, the aesthetic justifies the State. In this way, De Man is establishing a connection between liberal education and fascism (De Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, p. 154). 75 Quoted in Schulte-Sasse, ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic’, p. 131; originally in Interviews with Film Directors, ed. Andrew Sarris (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs, 1967), p. 394.

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interestingly, was co-written by film critic and acquaintance of Benjamin Béla Balázs.76 Kracauer in the 1940s and Susan Sontag in the 1970s were the most important voices to label Bergfilme as ‘an anthology of protoNazi sentiment’.77 Kracauer famously stressed the connection between mountain films and the official National-Socialist films in his Caligari book. He labelled Fanck’s films pro-Nazi and compared Fanck’s Avalanche (Stürme über dem Mont Blanc, 1930) with Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: ‘That in the opening sequence of the Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, of 1936 [sic], similar cloud masses surround Hitler’s airplane on its flight to Nuremberg, reveals the ultimate fusion of the mountain cult and the Hitler cult.’78 This statement has often been criticized for its teleological view.79 However, I would like to argue that the positive aspects of Kracauer’s 76 The Blue Light moves between the mythic world of a countryside outcast and the rationality of an urban visitor in a little village in the mountains of South Tyrol. The character played by Riefenstahl, Junta, is a wild and naïve woman who lives alone in a cabin and is rejected by the villagers. She is the only person who is able to reach the blue light that merges from the peak of a mountain without dying, as many young men did when following the light. For that reason, she is blamed for the death of these young villagers. The blue light suggests Novalis’s blue flower as a romantic sign of the ineffable. The unapproachable, in this case, is not only the blue light but also Junta, the wild woman who lives in communion with nature. The man who comes from the city, Vigo, falls in love with Junta and goes to live with her. Eventually, he discovers how to reach the place where the blue light comes from, a grotto full of gemstones. Vigo provides the villagers with the knowledge of how to find the grotto and exploit the precious stones for their own wealth. Linda Schulte reads this action as a demystification of nature in the service of instrumentality (‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic’, p.128). However, the exploitation of the mountain brings about the death of Junta, a martyr who reminds us of the impossibility of mastering nature and eventually demystifying it. Thus, Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light draws inspiration from Fanck’s mountain films, stresses the fearful and vengeful aspects of nature, and, even though it mentions the possibility of mobilizing technology for the sake of the people, builds its discourse around the submission of human beings to natural phenomena. 77 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 257–258; and Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, p. 76. The Bergfilme, however, have been recently revalued and read in connection with other productions from the Weimar period rather than allied to Nazi propaganda. Eric Rentschler, for example, tries to revaluate these films in ‘Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm’ according to the reception they had during the Weimar period and, therefore, rejects Kracauer’s apparently simplistic connection, since it disregards how it was received at the time. 78 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 257–258. 79 The retrospective interpretation of many films from the Weimar period as an anticipation of National Socialism has become the focus of strong criticism in Kracauer’s methodology. Quaresima, for example, has argued that the retrospective interpretation of the films is the book’s weakest point. Gertrud Koch also recognizes that Kracauer’s hermeneutic standpoint of telling ‘the history of German film from the vantage point of its present end’ is itself a methodological problem (Siegfried Kracauer, p. 77). Quaresima, nonetheless, recognizes a process of derivation in this methodology. Thus, according to this method, it could be argued that National Socialism used some motifs from previous films (e.g. Riefenstahl drew inspiration from Lang’s Die

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methodology are better expressed in his essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927) than in his introduction to Caligari: ‘The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself.’80 One of the most important ‘surface level expressions’ of the epoch was undoubtedly cinema, as Kracauer put it elsewhere: ‘As in no other art, film captures the most fleeting, contingent features of social life.’81 Thus, in analysing the surface level of an epoch, Kracauer detected the aesthetic expressions of some ideas which were latent in a period of turmoil and which would explode a few years later. Therefore, I would conclude that what this statement reveals—rather than the teleological anticipation of what is to come—is the significance Riefenstahl gives Hitler. He and the mountains demand to be honoured, exalted, ritualized. Like the mountains, Hitler becomes an image of projection of the inner self, an image of Germanness and power; both glorify submission to inexorable destiny and elemental might.82 Riefenstahl thus creates a mythical image of National Socialism, as the renaissance of a people led by Hitler. The film excludes history—or, rather, it places the rise of the Nazis to power as the superseding of history.83 By cultivating a ‘beautiful semblance’ in the film, Riefenstahl displaces the element of play in favour of semblance. As I have already mentioned, Schiller and Benjamin understood the element of play in art as the point at which human beings start to distance themselves from nature. Thus, the images cultivated by Riefenstahl reinforce the cultic elements in art, at the same time as they dismiss the playful elements of film. Hence, by stressing the cultic aspects of the regime, the people are represented through their submission to irrational forces. In Triumph of the Will, the depiction of the masses and the individuals within these masses is a corrupted representation. They perform a ritualistic function, kneeling Nibelungen or from Arnold Fanck’s mountain films). However, Quaresima disapproves of the ‘anticipationist’ hypothesis of Kracauer and, in opposition to Sontag (see ‘Fascinating Fascism’), claims that there cannot be an essential affinity between motifs used by, say, Fritz Lang and the ideology and aesthetics of National Socialism (Quaresima, ‘Rereading Kracauer’). 80 Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, in The Mass Ornament, p. 75. 81 Kracauer, ‘Ideenskizze zu meinem Buch über den Film’; quoted in Quaresima, ‘Rereading Kracauer’, p. xxiii. 82 Béla Balázs, who wrote the script for The Blue Light, praised Arnold Fanck’s Bergfilme precisely because the mountains functioned as a projection of the human soul and as a redemption of nature’s countenance (see Rentschler, ‘Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm’, pp. 143–144). 83 The introductory titles of Triumph of the Will read ‘19 Monate nach dem Beginn der Deutschen Wiedergeburt’ (‘Nineteen months after the beginning of the German rebirth’).

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down to Hitler. Angsar Hillach argues that, in the alternation between crowd scenes and close-ups, the individuals could have the ‘sensation of being a component part of a collective, a particle of a mass, or an appendage of a leader figure’.84 Gerhard Richter argues that, in these ‘highly aestheticized images’, ‘the Volk is given the illusionary perfection of a beautiful and politically eroticized Aryan countenance’.85 The masses can enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of being represented, but the face they are given is only an illusion of a beautiful, stable shape presented as synonymous with an identity, with an (armoured) ego. Such a face is, in short, only a fascist delusion that is carefully constructed through the film apparatus. In the third version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin writes: ‘The violation of the masses, whom fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual values.’86 The film apparatus, in the hands of fascism, is used only to produce and reproduce rituals in the service of a cult of the leader. The events organized by the NSDAP had a ritualistic character in themselves. Simon Taylor has argued that the construction of the ideological system and presentation of National Socialism sought expression in the mysteries of myth and symbol. In this way, the Nazi regime emulated the mysticism of Christian imagery and ritual consecrations in their own political celebrations. Therefore, National Socialism created a new mysticism— Hitler as the Messiah, the swastika as the deepest historical expression of the German Volk, a holy history of the movement, in the production of a false mood of national unity and class harmony.87 This ritualistic character can be clearly seen in Triumph of the Will: in the reception of Hitler; in the offerings of the harvest; in the parades of workers, soldiers, and the Hitler youth; and also in the speeches of the congress. The cultic element of this film is not only in the reproduction of symbols used by Nazism, such as the swastikas or the salutes, but in the presentation of an image without fissures of National Socialism as the rebirth of a people. There is a creation of a vision of National Socialism as a total work of art, based on ritual. This construction is made in paradoxical—even if conscious—terms. On the one hand, reproducible technology increases its exhibition value to reach a vast number of people who might experience the same feeling as those present at these gigantic parades; on the other hand, there is an exploitation of the 84 Hillach, ‘The Aesthetics of Politics: Walter Benjamin’s “Theories of German Fascism”’, p. 118. 85 Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 100. 86 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (third version), SW4, p. 269. 87 See Taylor, ‘Symbol and Ritual under National Socialism’.

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cultic elements of art to the detriment of those of play. Indeed, this use of film favours a contemplative reception at the expense of active engagement. Esther Leslie had argued that Riefenstahl’s aesthetics are a negation of industrial modernity by means of the reassertion of an idealist naturalism which ‘cultivates a classicism that is contingent on modern technology—yet denies it’.88 In Triumph of the Will, for example, the film begins with beautifully composed shots of the old town of Nuremberg. The city thus appears as diametrically opposed to the alienating American-like city of Metropolis, as the idealized epitome of the new Nazi society. The auratization of the city through the ‘beautiful semblance’ and harmony that the shots display seeks to build up a spectacle without fissures, to appraise the renaissance of a people by means of cultivating the most cultic features of classical art. For Benjamin, art is necessarily linked to both first and second technology: first technology being associated with semblance, cult, and magic, and second technology being connected to play, experimentation, and scientism. Technological art is deeply marked by the categories of second technology, but, nonetheless, is still informed by first technology. Thus, Leslie notes that fascist film tends to use ‘technology to promote predominantly the characteristics of first Technik’.89 Fascism attributes elements of cult to film, thus understanding second technology as if it were first technology. For that reason, the concepts associated with traditional art are exploited in technologically reproducible art under National Socialism, concealing the technological mediation of the camera. In a note from 1934, Benjamin makes a striking comparison between Chaplin and Hitler. The most surprising element of this note is that Benjamin compares Hitler’s ‘diminished masculinity’ with Chaplin’s effeminate little tramp character six years before Chaplin made The Great Dictator (1940).90 Benjamin also compares Hitler’s followers to the audience of Chaplin’s films. Whereas Chaplin is a ploughshare that cuts through the masses with laughter that loosens up the masses, in the Third Reich the ploughshare stamps the ground down firmly so ‘no more grass grows there’.91 Benjamin contrasts play and licence in Chaplin with the seriousness and rigour performed 88 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 141. 89 Ibid., p. 162. 90 This fact has not gone unnoticed by Benjamin scholars such as Miriam Hansen (‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, n332), although the point has never been further developed. The effeminization of the character of the little tramp reached its peak in the role of a heroine in the maternal melodrama The Kid (1920). See Woal and Woal, ‘Chaplin and the Comedy of Melodrama’. 91 Benjamin, ‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’, SW2, p. 792.

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by fascism in the auratization of its art. Chaplin is, in this way, associated with the characteristics of second technology; whereas fascism is related to the attributes of first technology in art—ritual, beautiful semblance, seriousness—which culminates in sacrificial death. Thus, the depiction of the effects of Hitler on the masses as ‘no more grass grows there’ is a direct reference to first technology’s goal of mastering nature. By contrast, Chaplin addresses the masses through laughter. His jokes are an epitome of second technology’s basis in repetition and play through which he is able to disrupt the apparent harmony displayed by the myth of National Socialism.92 For this reason, Benjamin argues that ‘Chaplin shows up the comedy of Hitler’s gravity’.93 He foresees that the little tramp and Hitler could perform the same character. As puppets had been banned in Mussolini’s Italy and Chaplin films in Nazi Germany, Benjamin argues that both dictators feared being supplanted either by a puppet or by Chaplin. Six years later, The Great Dictator performed precisely this when the Jewish barber is mistaken for Hitler.94 In Chaplin’s earlier film, The Idle Class (1921), a similar confusion takes place between two social types performed by Chaplin: the little tramp and an alcoholic millionaire. For Chaplin, the little tramp and the bourgeois were ultimately the same person. And so, writes Benjamin, ‘the vagabond is no less a parasite than the gent’.95 In this regard, Benjamin points out that Chaplin’s ‘bowler hat, which no longer sits so securely on his head, betrays the fact that the rule of the bourgeoisie is tottering’.96 Hence, Benjamin suggests that both the bourgeoisie and Hitler are frightened of becoming or being supplanted by a tramp or a Jew. Chaplin’s attributes, his clothes and the accoutrements, point in that direction. His clothes are too large and have become torn. They could have belonged to someone else or be proof that he, the little tramp, has seen better days. In her influential article on 92 Nonetheless, Adorno and Horkheimer accused Chaplin of using, in The Great Dictator, the same mystification of nature, viewed in opposition to society, as that carried out by fascism: ‘Tears of corn blowing in the wind at the end of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator give the lie to the anti-Fascist plea for freedom. They are like the blond hair of the German girl whose camp life is photographed by the Nazi f ilm company in the summer breeze. Nature is viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a healthy contrast to society, and is therefore denatured’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 149). 93 Benjamin, ‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’, SW2, p. 792. 94 In 1937, Chaplin mockingly claimed that Hitler had stolen his moustache. Eisenstein argues that, at that time, Chaplin viewed Hitler as a comedian, a grotesque clown. Years passed and Chaplin found out that Hitler was not only a clown, but also a bloodthirsty maniac. Then, says Eisenstein, Chaplin made The Great Dictator (Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, pp. 71–72). 95 Benjamin, ‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’, SW2, p. 793. 96 Ibid.

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the reception of Chaplin in Weimar Germany, Sabine Hake suggests that ‘[t]he difference between the clothes’ former splendor and their present shape point to a decline in social and economic status’.97 In this way, in the Germany of unemployment and inflation of the 1920s and 1930s, much of the audience could identify with that vertiginous social decline. Benjamin recognizes that the historical gesture of Chaplin—given that he is also the greatest comic of his time—is that ‘he has incorporated into himself the deepest fears of his contemporaries’.98 When Benjamin was preparing the f irst version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, he was still using the term ‘second nature’. As such, he noted that the utopias of first nature could be associated with the human body and those of second nature with social and technological problems. He argued that the fascist slogan of ‘blood and soil’ blocked the realization of either of these utopias. On the one hand, the idea of blood hinders the use of medicine to prevent the body from dying. On the other, the idea of soil runs counter to the utopia of second nature. For Benjamin, the incursions into the Arctic and the stratosphere carried out in the pacified Soviet Union were examples of this utopia. In fascism, the only way to realize a second-nature utopia, writes Benjamin, is when a man ascends to the stratosphere in order to drop bombs.99 Nazism, therefore, averts the elements of play in art in favour of seriousness, ‘beautiful semblance’, and cult. This obstruction prevents the utopian elements offered by both art and technology from thriving. In addition, as the concepts that fascism exploits in art and develops through technology are associated with first technology, their goal can only be a form of dominion over nature and the result, a form of self-abuse, can only lead to sacrificial death.

From the Aestheticization of Politics to Human Annihilation Under National Socialism, the aestheticization and ritualization of the public sphere were concurrent processes. In his article ‘Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art’, Rainer Stollmann argues that the path which takes art from an autonomous sphere to the aestheticization of politics is in the opposite direction to the communist politicization of art demanded by Benjamin. With the spread of capitalism throughout the nineteenth century and the 97 Hake, ‘Chaplin Reception in Weimar Germany’, p. 106. 98 Benjamin, ‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’, SW2, p. 792. 99 Benjamin, ‘A Different Utopian Will’, SW3, p. 134.

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principle of value abstraction, Stollmann writes that the social function of art decreased, and the concrete nature of art was devalued. In this sense, art and life were becoming increasingly separate entities. The reconciliation of art and life was problematized, given that, Stollmann argues, ‘the autonomy principle cannot be dealt with abstractly by demanding art’s integration into society’.100 The reconciliation of art and the social had become, for Benjamin, a question of politics. Benjamin’s call for a communist politicization of art entailed taking a path from autonomous art to the construction of socialism. Fascism, by contrast, presented a false sublation between art and life. Art under fascism was used to aestheticize and ritualize the public sphere to support and justify policies of imperialism and racism. National Socialism aimed to form the world in accordance with the laws of beauty, traceable in the words of Goebbels above. In this way, the Nazis could establish an aesthetic illusion, which was used to masquerade their control and coordination of all aspects of society. The masses could be mobilized for the sake of a beautiful illusion under the Gleichschaltung (coordination), the process of Nazif ication that established a totalitarian control over German society. German fascism transferred, as Stollmann puts it, ‘all energies, wishes, yearnings, psychic drives and phantasies into an aesthetic, socialistic illusion which worked to cover up the real causes of economic and psychic misery; indeed, it could even push for their continuation’.101 Through the same worship of the fetish of ‘beautiful semblance’, practised in traditional bourgeois art, the false but beautiful semblance of the Third Reich ‘became more powerful than any reality and any realistic evaluation of an individual’s social situation and political possibilities’.102 The difference between the ‘beautiful semblance’ of art and the ‘beautiful semblance’ propagated by fascism is that, whereas the former was used for a private flight from reality, the latter permeated the public sphere and mobilized human beings to the point of their own annihilation. According to Benjamin, ‘[a]ll efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war’.103 In political terms, this can be explained as follows: ‘War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations.’104 Such a mobilization of the masses follows an aesthetic, ritualistic principle, 100 Stollmann, ‘Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art’, p. 50. 101 Ibid., p. 52. 102 Ibid., p. 53. 103 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 121; italics in the original. 104 Ibid.

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which hides the economic reason behind such mobilization. In technological terms, Benjamin formulates the mobilization of warfare technology similarly: ‘only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technological resources while maintaining property relations.’105 In other words, the only way to mobilize the productive forces, both human and technological, without changing their relation of ownership was through war. This is the true economic and political significance of the fascist glorification of war. According to Jünger, historical materialism does not provide successful explanations for the causes of war, because it only focusses on the economic and not on the cultic nature of war.106 Benjamin, by disclosing the mediation of technology in the creation of a cult for the exaltation of wars, demystifies this ritualistic function and understands the real economic reasons behind the cult itself. In the last thesis of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin criticizes Marinetti’s praise of war and destruction through his manifesto on the colonial war in Ethiopia. In that text, Marinetti glorifies war and warfare technology as an aesthetic end in itself: the combination of gunfire and barrages forms a new symphony, a new architecture of armoured tanks and geometric squadrons of aircraft and the metallization of the human body. According to Benjamin, Marinetti only expects from war ‘the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology’.107 Benjamin concludes that this is the consummation of l’art pour l’art. In this conception of art, in which art is its own end, technology is conceived of as first technology with ritual features, and demands repayment in human material. This aestheticization of life and politics could only lead to the objectification and, eventually, annihilation of humanity. Benjamin formulates this idea as follows: ‘Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation 105 Ibid. 106 Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, p. 129. 107 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), p. 122. As a futurist, Marinetti reacted against old art. He perceived more beauty in the speed and violence of modern technology than in traditional bourgeois art. Apart from the new perception brought about by technology and, more specifically, mechanical warfare, Marinetti nevertheless praised old concepts of heroism and nationalism. He did not want to praise old wars and the Roman Empire (‘The boring memory of the Roman grandeur must be cancelled and replaced with an Italian grandeur a hundred times bigger’), but the technological warfare of 20th-century wars and the nation which Italy was to become. Marinetti, therefore, welcomed the imperialist reception of technology as a means for destruction and spiritual renewal. In other words, instead of praising the aura of the Victory of Samothrace, he preferred to praise the gas warfare, which abolishes the aura (Marinetti’s quote is from ‘The Second Political Manifesto of Futurism’, 11 October 1911, written on the eve of the Libyan war; cited in Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, p. 69).

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for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.’108 Benjamin talks about a relation of ‘contemplation’ associated with an old conception of aesthetics. He understands aesthetics as the historical development of human perception, which has been deeply altered by technology, and thus he addresses, as part of his anthropological materialism, the historical impact of technology upon the human body and, more specifically, the human sensorium. Fascism finds in war an aesthetic gratification of the technologically transformed human senses. This aesthetic experience is addressed, however, according to concepts associated with old aesthetics, such as ritual and contemplation. Benjamin sought to understand, dialectically, the aesthetics of warfare defended by Marinetti. Imperialism does not develop technology in order to provide human beings with a better life, but for economic growth. As soon as new markets cannot be reached and unemployment starts to grow, the development of technology can only lead to the deployment of both technology and human material in war. In what may appear to be a deterministic argument, Benjamin blames the property system for impeding the natural use of productive forces, which is nothing other than technology put to humane ends. In this, Benjamin conceives of the transformation of property relations as a first step towards the natural utilization of productive forces, both workers and technology. Fascism, by contrast, negates the right to transform property relations. Consequently, fascism utilizes war as a diversion in order to avoid the material reality of class struggle. By summoning supra-class goals, says Esther Leslie, ‘people can be mobilized not as classes but as masses’. This is ‘the only way the advance of modern Technik can be contained without endangering property relations’.109 The increasing use of technical sources of energy is directed to ‘unnatural’ ends, in the form of war. Benjamin had already noted this dangerous diversion of energy in the work of Jünger, who claimed that total mobilization ‘conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life towards the great current of martial energy’.110 Benjamin returns to the point made in ‘To the Planetarium’ in relation to the First World War, in which technology, in retribution for the imperialist conception of technology as the mastery of nature by humanity, betrayed humanity in a bloodbath. In the end of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin repeats the idea as follows: 108 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 112. 109 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 135. 110 Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, p. 127.

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‘Imperialist war is an uprising on the part of technology, which demands repayment in “human material” for the natural material society has denied it.’111 As in the other texts dealing with technology (such as One Way Street [1928], ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ [1929] and ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ [1937]), Benjamin understands technology as a source of energy. He argues that, in imperialist wars, society deploys the labour force in the form of armies, instead of ‘deploying power stations across the land’.112 Technology, instead of becoming a source of valuable energy for humanity, turns its energy against humans. In this imperialist conception, technology cannot appear as a ‘key to happiness’. The destruction caused by war is the result of a doomed appropriation of technology, anticipated in ‘To the Planetarium’ and ‘Theories of German Fascism’. Repeating the same words from the latter essay, Benjamin argues that this fact proved that ‘society was not mature enough to make technology its organ, that technology was not sufficiently developed to master the elemental forces of society’.113 In other words, Benjamin claims that society needs, first, to change property relations and, second, to reformulate its conception of technology in order to incorporate technology as a social, collective organ. Earlier in the essay, Benjamin suggests that cinema was the privileged sphere for this collective innervation. However, the failed reception of technology in Germany and its use and abuse under fascism prevented the collective from an innervation that would produce a more salutary relationship among humanity, technology, and nature. German fascism preferred to direct all that energy to war and used film technology instead to provide a simulacrum in which the masses could see themselves reflected. In the cult of Hitler, the masses could imagine themselves as bearers of an armoured ego and a stable identity. Eventually, however, technology would turn all its energies, and all the energies of society, towards human beings. In f inding pleasure in the reif ication of human beings, fascism—through technology and film—reveals ‘the triumph of a nihilistic will’.114 Benjamin’s theses are, in short, an urgent warning about the fatal consequences of such a destructive conception of technology. 111 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, pp. 121–122; italics in the original. 112 Ibid., p. 122. 113 Ibid., p. 121. 114 These are the words that Kracauer uses to define Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. He continues: ‘it is a frightening spectacle to see many an honest, unsuspecting youngster enthusiastically submit to his corruption, and long columns of exalted men march towards the barren realm of this will as though they themselves wanted to pass away’ (From Caligari to Hitler, p. 303).

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Bibliography Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. by J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2001). Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence (1928–1940), ed. by Henri Lonitz, trans. by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Léa Barbisan, ‘Eccentric Bodies. From Phenomenology to Marxism: Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on Embodiment’, Anthropology & Materialism, 1 (2017), pp. 1–15. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Hella TiedemannBartels, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), III (1972). — ‘Moscow Diary’, October, 35 (1985), pp. 9–135. — The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), I (1996). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), II (1999). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), III (2002). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), IV (2003). — ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (first version), Grey Room, 39 (2010), pp. 11–37. Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996). Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester/New York: Camden House, 2010). Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October, 62 (1992), pp. 3–41. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, trans. by André Cabaret (Paris: Circé, 2013). Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinema: The Irresponsible Signif ier or “The Gamble with History”: Film Theory or Cinema Theory’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 65–89. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000).

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Sabine Hake, ‘Chaplin Reception in Weimar Germany’, New German Critique, 51 (1990), pp. 87–111. Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, Critical Inquiry, 25:2 (1999), pp. 306–343. — ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry, 34 (2008), pp. 336–375. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Ansgar Hillach, ‘The Aesthetics of Politics: Walter Benjamin’s “Theories of German Fascism”’, New German Critique, 17 (1979), pp. 99–119. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2000). Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1996). Ernst Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. by Richard Wolin, trans. by Joel Golb and Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 119–139. Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction, trans. by Jeremy Gaines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Lutz Peter Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1995). — From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, ed., with an intro., by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000). — Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London/ New York: Verso, 2002). Paul de Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed., with an intro., by Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1996), pp. 129–162. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 (New York: Octagon Books, 1972). Leonardo Quaresima, ‘Rereading Kracauer’, in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, ed. by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. xv–l. Eric Rentschler, ‘Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light’, October, 48 (1989), pp. 46–68. — ‘Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm’, New German Critique, 51 (1990), pp. 137–161. Gerhard Richter, ‘Face-Off’, Monatshefte, 90:4 (1998), pp. 411–444.

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— Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). Leni Riefenstahl, The Sieve of Time: The Memoirs of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Quartet, 1992). Linda Schulte-Sasse, ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic’, Cultural Critique, 18 (1991), pp. 123–148. Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in Under the Sign of Saturn (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 71–105. Rainer Stollmann, ‘Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aesthetization of Political Life in National Socialism’, trans. by Ronald L. Smith, New German Critique, 14 (1978), pp. 41–60. Simon Taylor, ‘Symbol and Ritual under National Socialism’, The British Journal of Sociology, 32:4 (1981), pp. 504–520. Michael Woal and Linda Kowall Woal, ‘Chaplin and the Comedy of Melodrama’, Journal of Film and Video, 46:3 (1994), pp. 3–15.

4. Charlie Chaplin: The Return of the Allegorical Mode in Modernity 1 Abstract This chapter addresses Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charlie Chaplin as a project to rehabilitate allegory in the 20th century. This project is evaluated in connection with Kafka and Brecht, since Benjamin approached all of these figures through the concept of Gestus. Benjamin discerned in film the prospect of undoing the numbing of the senses, which had become deadened as a consequence of the shock experience of modern life. In connection with Kafka and Brecht, this chapter analyses Chaplin as a paradigmatic cinematic figure to counteract the alienation of human beings in a technologically saturated modernity through his gestic and allegorical performance. Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Charlie Chaplin; allegory; Franz Kafka; Bertolt Brecht; Gestus; The Circus; Modern Times.

Charlie Chaplin is the actor and director most frequently mentioned in Benjamin’s writings. From his articles on Soviet film in 1927 to the last version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ in 1939, Walter Benjamin consistently returns to Chaplin when discussing the potential power of film. Given the laudatory remarks that many intellectuals professed towards Chaplin, Benjamin’s appraisal should not come as a surprise. Nonetheless, since Benjamin centres his analysis on the relationship of slapstick comedy and technology, it is puzzling why Benjamin does not also reference Buster Keaton, whose films are commonly replete with machines. Contrary to Chaplin, however, Keaton is at ease with 1 An earlier, shorter version of this chapter was published as ‘Walter Benjamin on Charlie Chaplin: The Rehabilitation of the Allegorical in Modernity’, in Benjamin’s Figures: Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities, ed. by Madeleine Kasten, Rico Sneller, and Gerard Visser (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2018), pp. 193–211.

Mourenza, D., Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462980174_ch04

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technology and eventually manages—after a number of passages in which technology acts as if it has a life of its own—to use and transform machines and other technological utensils at his will. For this reason, Keaton can be seen as immune to the worst effects of industrialization,2 whereas Chaplin is its victim. Benjamin began to write about Chaplin at a relatively late stage. Apart from some small references, his first important text was a review of The Circus (1928), ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, published in Die literarische Welt on 8 February 1929. The Circus was Chaplin’s fourth full-length film after The Kid (1921), A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923), and The Gold Rush (1925). There is a general consensus among academics that Chaplin’s shorts, especially those directed for the Keystone, Essanay, and Mutual studios, are more transgressive than his feature films. Miriam Hansen, for example, argues that his early films are anarchistic protests ‘against the regimentation of the industrial-capitalist workplace, the discipline of the clock, and the conveyor belt, through a subversive mimicry of processes of reification and alienation’, whereas his longer films approach the Tramp persona from individual psychology and human sympathy, presenting the character as ‘universal and timeless’.3 For these reasons, it would seem that Benjamin would be more interested in Chaplin’s early work, and yet all Chaplin’s films that he mentions—apart from The Circus, he also talks about A Woman of Paris, and The Gold Rush—are feature films. Indeed, in ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, he supports Philippe Soupault’s questionable assertion that A Woman of Paris is Chaplin’s best film. It is also true that Chaplin’s films were banned in Germany until 1921 and that his earlier short films were released at the same time as his first feature films. Benjamin is nevertheless aware that The Circus is a late film and characterizes it as a mature work, as ‘the first film of Chaplin’s old age’, inviting us to look back at his career from this vantage point. 4 The 1929 review of The Circus is constructed from notes that Benjamin jotted down after seeing the film. He notes that, in the film, Chaplin makes the audience ‘either double up laughing or be very sad’ but never simply smile. The film review becomes, in this way, a rehearsal for the theory of laughter that he was developing in those years. In the film, the audience of the circus no longer laughs with the old clowns, but they double up laughing when the Tramp accidently appears on stage when escaping from the police. The audience demands that the ‘funny man’ come back and the owner of the 2 North, Machine-Age Comedy, p. 12. 3 Hansen, Babel & Babylon, p. 76. 4 Benjamin, ‘Chaplin’, SW2, p. 199.

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circus feels obliged to hire Chaplin. However, when he instructs him to ‘Go ahead and be funny’, it obviously does not work. Chaplin induces laughter when he fails to fit the roles he is supposed to play, both in terms of tasks to be carried out and the roles to be assumed. Only when he is asked to work as a property master and smashes all the props does he manage to make the audience laugh. Years later, Benjamin connects this source of laughter with the mechanical movements of Chaplin, although he remains unable to point to its humorous element. In the 1929 note, Benjamin makes a first approximation through a comparison of Chaplin’s gestures with those of a machine. More particularly, he connects the way Chaplin greets others by taking off his bowler and the way the lid of the kettle rises when the water boils. Benjamin also refers to the Tramp’s clothes, not only their ragged quality, but how they appear ‘far too small for him’.5 Benjamin must be referring to Chaplin’s blazer, given his trousers are, on the contrary, far too large—creating a mismatch between his upper and lower attire. At the end of the unpublished note, Benjamin beautifully describes the film’s ending, in one of the very few cases in which he provides an analysis of specific images, which he unfortunately omits in the review. In this fragment, he characterizes Chaplin’s way of walking, which he later describes through the Brechtian concept of Gestus, as Chaplin’s own trademark: [Chaplin] strews confetti over the happy couple, and you think: This must be the end. Then you see him standing there when the circus procession starts off; he shuts the door behind everyone, and you think: This must be the end. Then you see him stuck in the rut of the circle earlier drawn by poverty, and you think: This must be the end. Then you see a close-up of his completely bedraggled form, sitting on a stone in the arena. Here you think the end is absolutely unavoidable, but then he gets up and you see him from behind, walking further and further away, with that gait peculiar to Charlie Chaplin; he is his own walking trademark, just like the company trademark you see at the end of other films. And now, at the only point where there’s no break and you’d like to be able to follow him with your gaze forever—the film ends!6

Chaplin was, at the time that Benjamin wrote this review, not only admired by the general public—perhaps the most popular celebrity in the world—but also by many artists and intellectuals, especially on the left, including 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., pp. 199–200.

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Siegfried Kracauer, Béla Bálazs, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Jean Cocteau, Elie Faure, Louis Delluc, and the surrealists, to name a few.7 Indeed, in his review, Benjamin relies heavily on an article written by the French surrealist Philippe Soupault, supplementing his previous ideas with this text, which he probably read in preparation for the review. For Benjamin, this essay, published in the literary magazine Europe: Revue mensuelle, contains ‘ideas around which a definitive picture of the great artist will one day be able to crystallize’.8 Following Soupault, Benjamin argues that the importance of Chaplin does not reside in his abilities as an actor—no more than in the case of Shakespeare—but rather as an ‘author’ of his films.9 This reference to Chaplin the director as an ‘author’, which undoubtedly recalls the French ‘auteur theory’ developed around Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, seems to be at odds with Benjamin’s general contempt for the role of the director in his film aesthetics. Drawing here on a French film critic, he might have considered that Chaplin, as both an actor and director, expressed a unique way of seeing in his films, or, as Soupault put it, imbued his films ‘with a poetry that everyone encounters in his life’.10 This type of consideration was common in the film criticism of the time. Balázs, for example, similarly claimed that Chaplin the filmmaker was more important than Chaplin the actor. For Balázs, it is his childlike nature that ‘gives him a view of the world that becomes poetic in films’.11 In a similar vein, Eisenstein claimed that the genius of Chaplin lay in his childlike gaze, through which he makes the smallest event big, and highlighted his faculty of looking comically at things that frightened others.12 Both Balázs and Eisenstein argued that, behind his comedy, there was a melancholy for a lost paradise, which the 7 Many intellectuals from and around the surrealist circle in Paris were Chaplin enthusiasts and wrote relevant texts about him. For example, the surrealist group produced a text together called ‘Hands Off Love’ in defence of Chaplin in the public scandal that emerged in the wake of the bill of divorce issued by his second wife Lita Grey and her lawyers. The surrealists supported Chaplin’s vision of love and railed against morality and the institution of marriage, as defended in the 52-page document issued against Chaplin. Many writers based their literary work on this f igure and on American slapstick in general, such as Yvan Goll’s f ilm-poem The Chaplinade (1920), Luis Buñuel’s article on Buster Keaton’s College (1927), the collection of poems by Rafael Alberti Yo era un tonto y lo que vi me hizo dos tontos (1929), and the dialogue by Federico García Lorca Buster Keaton’s Promenade (1928). 8 Benjamin, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, SW2, p. 222. 9 Soupault argues that Chaplin’s greatest film is A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923), the only film, apart from the late A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), in which Chaplin does not appear as an actor (Benjamin, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, SW2, pp. 222–223). 10 Benjamin, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, SW2, p. 222. 11 Balázs, ‘Chaplin, The Ordinary American’, in Early Film Theory, p. 86. 12 Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, p. 14.

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latter characterized as ‘the paradise of childhood’.13 As I will argue in this chapter, this melancholy that many authors identified in Chaplin can be associated with the projection of an allegorical gaze upon things. Benjamin perceived in Chaplin’s performance a rehabilitation of allegory in the 20th century—a rehabilitation that he also found in the writings of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. This chapter follows and develops an argument that Miriam Hansen posed in her posthumously published book Cinema and Experience. There, Hansen claims that Benjamin discerned in both Chaplin and Kafka ‘a return of the allegorical mode of modernity’.14 For her, both authors performed the fragmentation and abstraction of the bodies of their characters, making legible their own alienation. The difference between Chaplin and Kafka, says Hansen, is that the former ‘combines melancholy with the force of involuntary collective laughter’.15 Whereas Kafka and Chaplin both bear traces of melancholy, the laughter induced by Chaplin contrasts with the ironic—but not overtly humorous—tenet of Kafka and Baroque allegory. Hansen also contends that the social and political significance of American slapstick was the ability to represent the perceptual and bodily fragmentation of the human body in modernity through a ‘gestic’ performance. Hansen makes here a second connection, this time between Chaplin and Brecht, whose concept of Gestus was originally based on Chaplin’s performance. These connections are not fortuitous, however, given Benjamin perceived in contemporary cultural figures such as Kafka, Brecht, and Chaplin an allegorical intention to express the fragmentation of modern human beings through different media, whether literature, theatre, or film. Although Benjamin remained cautious of asserting an allegorical intention in Chaplin, he notes that Chaplin ‘interprets himself allegorically’.16 Benjamin acknowledged that Chaplin used the rhetorical figure of allegory in his films, and contemplated the possibility of extending his work on allegory, as studied in the Baroque Trauerspiel and in Baudelaire’s poetry, into the films of a 20th-century movie star. In Benjamin’s reading, Chaplin’s cinematic body becomes an expression of wider bodily fragmentation and an example of the eccentricity of the body that he introduced in ‘Perception and Body’ (1918). In Chaplin, the illusion of a stable ego is excluded through the body, the target of all the vicissitudes of 13 Balázs, ‘Chaplin, The Ordinary American’, p. 85; Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, p. 16. 14 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, pp. 47–48. 15 Ibid., p. 48. 16 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I:3, p. 1047; quoted in Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 130.

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the modern age. Benjamin perceived in Chaplin’s performance an allegorical rendering of the fragmentation of the human body in modernity. The rehabilitation of allegory that Benjamin suggested in Chaplin focussed, on the one hand, on the dismemberment of the body of the actor through the film structure and, on the other, on the therapeutic, mimetic reception of the audience, which reacts collectively to Chaplin’s gags. Benjamin was particularly enthusiastic about American slapstick given it exploited the playful elements of film, especially in the interaction of human beings with technology. He suggested that the salutary consequences of American slapstick came about through the enlargement of the space for play (Spielraum) in art. Everything in the sphere of play could be reversed and offered a second chance. As Hansen puts it, through a regime of play, ‘film has the potential to reverse […] the catastrophic consequences of an already failed reception of technology’.17 Around the same time that Benjamin wrote his review of Chaplin, he drafted another text in which he developed the inextricability of notions such as play, technology, gesture, and innervation, entitled ‘Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’ (c.1928–1929). In these writings, Benjamin argues that play and reality ideally coincide, as when acted gestures become fused with real ones.18 He argues—and here there is a profound similarity to Schiller’s notion of play—that it is only through play that childhood can be fulfilled. Benjamin saw in Chaplin this process: an attempt to regain childhood and, with it, children’s gestures. In children’s proletarian theatre, a world of sheer fantasy was released through the innervation of gesture in performance. For Benjamin, the secret signal revealed in these gestures was the most revolutionary act of theatre—a theatre which, he said, ‘will unleash in children the most powerful energies of the future’.19 At the beginning of this text, Benjamin suggests that this theatrical education should be undertaken prior to school, where they should be instructed in technology, class history, and public speaking, among other subjects. Through the programme of this theatre, children would be brought up in a proletarian manner, as a precondition for a more critical and revolutionary approach to technology. In ‘The Present Situation of Soviet Film’ (1927), the first text that Benjamin wrote on film, he praised American slapstick over Russian comedies. For him, slapstick performed an ironic discourse towards technological matters contrary to the idealized discourse on technology typical in Soviet Russia. For that reason, Benjamin regretted 17 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 139. 18 Benjamin, ‘Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’, SW2, pp. 201–206. 19 Ibid., p. 202.

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that, in the Soviet Union, the opportunity to see American slapstick was becoming increasingly scarce, and he criticized the Russian actor Ilyinsky for being ‘a very imprecise copy of Chaplin’.20

The Rehabilitation of Allegory Benjamin developed his conception of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) (1925–1928), a book in which he put forward an understanding of Baroque German mourning plays as secularized Christian drama. His argument was that, whereas in the Middle Ages the transience of living creatures was attached to salvation, the Baroque era denied religious fulfilment, focussing instead on secular solutions to existence. For Benjamin, the German Baroque mourning play or Trauerspiel is an ‘expression of the era’s theological situation’.21 As an expression of a period of crisis in which salvation is no longer granted, the Trauerspiel ‘arises from an apprehension of the world as no longer permanent, as passing out of being’.22 For this reason, Benjamin finds that Baroque dramas are no longer based on myth, as in the case of tragedy, but on earthly matters and, as a consequence, there is no room for the tragic hero. Benjamin makes a leap in the German theatrical tradition, connecting the Baroque drama and Brecht’s work, in ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’ (f irst version c.1930–1931; second version 1939). Given that Brecht’s plays could not be called melancholic, they could hardly be argued to be allegorical. Nevertheless, Benjamin conceived irony and fragmentation as variants of allegory that may reappear in later periods.23 This connection, for Benjamin, had not reached his generation on a monumental road, but rather via a ‘mule track, neglected and overgrown’.24 Hence, the untragic hero comes to light again in Brecht, but only after having passed through ‘some obscure smugglers’ path’.25 Traditionally, allegory has been understood as a rhetorical figure that indicates a way of writing or saying one thing, yet meaning something different. Benjamin, nonetheless, understands allegory principally as a 20 Benjamin, ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’, SW2, p. 12. 21 Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought, p. 69. 22 Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, p. 110. 23 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 188. Hereafter referred to as ‘the Trauerspiel book’. 24 Benjamin, ‘What Is the Epic Theater? (II)’, SW4, p. 304. 25 Ibid.

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way of looking at things. He also refers in his writings to ‘the allegorical way of seeing’, ‘the allegorical attitude’, ‘the allegorical intention’, as well as ‘allegorical intuition’.26 In a letter to Scholem dated 19 February 1925, Benjamin describes the epistemo-critical introduction to the Trauerspiel book as ‘a kind of second stage of my early work on language […] dressed up as a theory of ideas’. 27 The Trauerspiel book can thus be considered a continuation of his theory of language outlined in texts such as ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916) and ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1921).28 The idea of allegory is already present in these texts. In the former, Benjamin writes that, in the beginning, there was the Tree of Life, before man’s fall from paradise. From then onwards, the Tree of Knowledge governed the world, which is now a world of separation. Before the fall, there was no division between name and thing, and hence there was no need for an external knowledge to bridge the gap between being and thinking. Benjamin bestows upon man the task of completing the process of creation. Human beings accomplish this task by translating the imperfect, mute language of nature into the language of names, since they have been granted with the gift of language. ‘By bestowing names upon things,’ argues Richard Wolin, ‘man elevates them, grants them dignity, redeems them from a fate of speechless anonymity.’29 The task of the allegorist is, through a subjective procedure, to restore the state in which things will be called by their proper names. In other words, allegory restores the origin. For Benjamin, however, the concept of ‘origin’ (Ursprung30) ‘is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance’.31 Thus, he argues, ‘that which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual’, but needs to be recognized, both as a process of restoration and reestablishment, and as something imperfect and incomplete.32 Allegory is precisely the technique that articulates this movement and makes it 26 Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, p. 112. 27 Letter to Scholem, 19 February 1925 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 261). 28 Similarities can be found in Benjamin’s subsequent, though immanent, conception of history, especially in the theses ‘On the Concept of History’. 29 Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, p. 42. 30 Samuel Weber points out that one of the meanings of Sprung is ‘crack’. From this linguistic observation, he argues that ‘[t]he Ur-Sprung is the irremediable split or crack that marks the movement of restoration and reinstatement by which singular beings seek to totalize themselves in their extremity’ (Weber, ‘Genealogy of Modernity’, pp. 472–473). 31 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 45. 32 Ibid.

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visible. In this way, allegory does not try to return to a golden past that can be ‘recaptured in toto’ but redeem those elements from the past under threat of being forgotten. Bainard Cowan suggests that, although the ‘existence-in-absence of truth’ has been explained in origin-myths of fall and rupture, it can only be understood by analysing representation. According to him, ‘allegory shows a conviction that the truth resides elsewhere’.33 Allegory, in this sense, acknowledges that the human condition is exiled from truth. As signification, allegory recognizes both the existence of truth and its absence, its inaccessibility. Truth cannot be found in the sign, but elsewhere. Allegory illuminates precisely this gap between sign and signified. For this reason, in allegory there is always an interpretative context not given to the reader, who has to grasp and complete it.34 In short, truth is not as much in the content as in the form: in the process of representing. Allegory, therefore, does not aim at a self-enclosed organicity as does the symbol, but links the fragment to the total, leaving such fragments visible. In the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin contends, in relation to allegory, that: The writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal impression which was aimed at. Hence the display of the craftsmanship, which, in Calderón especially, shows through like the masonry in a building whose rendering has broken away.35

Allegory is both fragmentary and visible. It is for this reason that Benjamin always highlights the fragmentary nature of those forms in which he detects a redemptive function. In ‘The Task of the Translator’, for example, he compares translation with the fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together. For him, both the original and the translation must be ‘recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel’.36 Esther Leslie compares this idea of the fragments of a broken vessel that must be brought together with both montage and the restorative practice of the angel of history. If, according to the cabbalistic concept of tikkun, God’s vessel was broken and divine sparks in fragments were scattered 33 Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, p. 113. 34 Lloyd Spencer recognizes that ‘Benjamin’s all-too-automatic movement from allegory as a literary figure or mode to the allegorical “way of seeing” is itself a source of difficulty in Benjamin’s writings’ (Spencer, ‘Allegory in the World of the Commodity’, p. 62). 35 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 179. 36 Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, SW1, p. 260.

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throughout the material world, the world is to be put back together in ‘a montage praxis, using debris and rubbish, the broken pots and torn scraps, not the high, sublime reordering of harmony in a bloodless, hands-off aestheticism’.37 This idea is also similar to the image of the cinematographic apparatus entering reality as a surgical tool, which Benjamin uses in the ‘Work of Art’ essay to illustrate the assembling nature of film. Whereas the painter, like the magician, maintains a natural distance from reality, the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue. If the former creates a total image, the cinematographer’s image is piecemeal, ‘its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law’.38 Leslie has noticed that, in this simile of the cinematographer as a surgeon, there is an idea of dissecting the totality, which offers ‘a new way of representing actuality in its multiple potential modalities’.39 In this way, Leslie suggests that Benjamin considered montage to be an avant-garde procedure able ‘to eliminate the organic totalities of art categories’.40 Hence, through the fragmentariness of disparate art forms, Benjamin tried to conceive allegorical procedures—or allegorical ways of looking at things—in such different authors and formats as the Baroque dramatists, Baudelaire, and even, as I shall show, Brecht, Kafka, and Chaplin. Benjamin drafted some comparisons between Kafka and Chaplin in the notes that led to his great essay on Kafka from 1934, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’. The most important one for the present discussion reads as follows: Chaplin holds in his hands a genuine key to the interpretation of Kafka. Just as occurs in Chaplin’s situations, in which in a quite unparalleled way rejected and disinherited existence, eternal human agony combines with the particular circumstances of contemporary being, the monetary system, the city, the police, etc., so too in Kafka every event is Janus-faced, completely immemorial, without history and yet, at the same time, possessing the latest, journalistic topicality. 41

This commentary suggests that the connection between the allegorical mode in Kafka and Chaplin materializes in the way that they blend ahistorical, human conditions and contingent situations. The two sides of this ‘allegorical 37 Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’, p. 12. 38 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 116. 39 Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 141. 40 Ibid. 41 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 1198; quoted in Leslie, Walter Benjamin, pp. 119–120.

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mode’ can be characterized, on the one hand, by ‘journalistic topicality’ and, on the other, by a ‘completely immemorial’ time. Benjamin contrasts allegory to both tragedy and symbol through its foundation, not in myth, but in history. Both the content and style of allegory are generated from history and the sociopolitical texture in which the drama takes place. Adorno puts it plainly: ‘The theme of the allegorical is, simply, history.’42 For him, the relationship between sign and signification in allegory is a historical relationship, an expression of the historical context from which it arises. For that reason, in his introduction to the Trauerspiel book, Georges Steiner argues that the Baroque dramatist and the allegorist ‘cling fervently to the world’, because the Trauerspiel is mundane, earth-bound, and corporeal. 43 Rather than being transcendental, it ‘celebrates the immanence of existence’. 44 The completely immemorial, ahistorical conditions of human existence that Kafka and Chaplin brought about in their work represents the other side of allegory. For Benjamin, then, allegory is not only concerned with the appreciation of the transience of things, but also with rescuing them for eternity. 45 Allegory is, in this way, able to rescue the forgotten, hidden, unsuccessful, and sorrowful elements of history to create and develop new and multiple meanings, which may eventually influence the present. In The Arcades Project (1927–1940) and the theses ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), Benjamin substitutes the ‘dialectical image’ for allegory. In these texts, the dialectical image brings the present into conflict with its origin, with a primeval age: ‘In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always, simultaneously, “what has been from time immemorial.”’46 The allegorical mode that both Kafka and Chaplin revive in their own styles is the possibility of creating that leap from a sort of eternal knowledge which lies dormant in a time immemorial to the actuality of the modern, chaotic, and fragmentary world. Benjamin also presents this function of allegory in his discussion of Kafka’s parables. In a 1934 diary entry, recorded in Brecht’s residence in Denmark, Benjamin writes a note on Kafka in which he couples parable and allegory: ‘[Kafka’s] starting point is really the parable, the allegory, which is answerable to reason and hence cannot be entirely in earnest on the literal plane.’47 In this line of argument, Benjamin claims in his 1934 essay on Kafka that 42 Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, p. 119. 43 Steiner, ‘Introduction’, in Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 16. 44 Ibid. 45 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 223. 46 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [N4, 1], p. 464. 47 Benjamin, ‘Notes from Svendborg, Summer 1934’, SW2, p. 784.

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his stories are set in a swamp world (Sumpfwelt), at a stage which is now forgotten, but this does not mean that it does not extend to the present. ‘On the contrary’, says Benjamin, ‘it is present by virtue of this very oblivion.’48 According to Benjamin, the experience transmitted in these stories is deeper than for the modern subject, given Kafka did not consider his age to be an advance on previous times, rather one overlapped with earlier epochs. The power of his parables is to bring ancient wisdom to the present and make allegorical commentaries on the contemporary situation. In the essay on Kafka, Benjamin analyses the allegorical function of his parables to argue that they unfold as a bud unfolds into a blossom—and not as a folded paper unfolds into a flat sheet. For this reason, Kafka’s parables do not have a single and clear meaning, they do not clarify, but rather open up to a richness of significance, which relates them to religious-like teachings. Tim BeasleyMurray has analysed this concept of ‘unfolding’ in Benjamin in relation to other seminal motifs in his oeuvre. For him, the difference between these two ways of unfolding is similar to the different approaches towards the past of historicism and historical materialism. Hence, whereas the historicist provides a unique, eternal image of the past—like the paper that unfolds into a flat sheet—historical materialism, by confronting the past as a monad, recognizes a seed inside historical time with germinative power, which can be nourished, empowered, and brought into the present. Thus, historical materialism does not overlook historical phenomena as historicism does.49 Along this line of thought, Beasley-Murray argues that blasting a specific era or object out of the homogenous course of history, as Benjamin proposes in the theses ‘On the Concept of History’, is a variant of unfolding ‘that allows time itself to come to fruit as the historically understood’.50 In this way, the past is seen as a seed pregnant with germinating powers, unfolding into the present and the future. According to Beasley-Murray, film might be thought of in the same terms. Benjamin, however, did not use the same word as in the previously mentioned examples—that is, entfalten, but rather abrollen, better translated as ‘rolling out’.51 Though abrollen would not have the same 48 Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’, SW2, p. 809. 49 Beasley-Murray, ‘On Some Seminal Motifs in Walter Benjamin’, p. 780. 50 Ibid. 51 Tim Beasley-Murray refers to the following fragment from the ‘Work of Art’ essay: ‘Let us compare the screen [Leinwand] on which a film unfolds with the canvas [Leinwand] of a painting. The image on the film screen changes, whereas the image on the canvas does not’ (Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ [second version], SW3, n132). Nonetheless, Benjamin uses the term unfolding with regard to film in other texts: ‘Film: unfolding [resultant?—Auswicklung or Aswirkung] of all the forms of perception, the tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in today’s machines, such

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connotations of unfolding in the sense of gaining in complexity, BeasleyMurray relies on the optical unconscious—following the passage about exploding the prison-world of our city streets—to identify how ‘the artificial landscape of modernity unfolds into new and unforeseeable blossoms’.52 The outcome of such a blossoming is not first nature, but second nature: ‘the Blue Flower in the land of technology’.53 Following Beasley-Murray’s argument, it could be argued that the allegorical unfoldings of Kafka and, by the same token, of Chaplin, are able to bring seeds from the past, in the form of wisdom and gesture, to confront the present.54 In film, this collision allows the audience, in the mimetic innervation of film technology, to incorporate this blossoming seed into the first nature of the collective body as organized in cinema reception.

Staging Self-Alienation: Gestus in Brecht and Kafka In 1929, Asja Lācis moved to Berlin, where she worked for the film section of the Soviet trade representation, and lived with Benjamin for two months.55 Through Lācis, Benjamin made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht in May 1929.56 In that period, the three of them engaged in passionate that all problems of contemporary art find their definitive formulation only in the context of film’ (The Arcades Project, convolute [K3, 3], p. 394); ‘Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different?’ (The Arcades Project, convolute [C 1, 9], p. 83). 52 Beasley-Murray, ‘On Some Seminal Motifs in Walter Benjamin’, p. 784. 53 ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 115. 54 Beasley-Murray’s argument can be applied to the allegorical intuition of Chaplin through the following remarks by Béla Balázs: ‘[Chaplin] never operates with a finished, fully worked-out story that can then be filled with the detailed realities of life (as the ready-made form is filled with molten bronze). He does not begin with an idea, with a form, but with the living material of individual realities. He creates his films inductively, not deductively. He does not shape his material but lets it grow and unfold, like a living plant. He feeds it with the blood of his blood, trains it and refines it until ever deeper meanings are revealed. He is no sculptor of dead matter but an expert gardener who cultivates a living life’ (Balázs, ‘Chaplin, The Ordinary American’, p. 86). It can be argued that, with this way of working, the germinating seeds from the past which are hidden in the present can unfold and collide with the very actualities and topicalities represented by the film. 55 Leslie, Walter Benjamin, p. 92. 56 Although, according to Erdmut Wizisla, Benjamin and Brecht first met as early as November 1924 (via Lācis). In the next few years, they met occasionally, until they began a serious friendship in 1929 (see Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht).

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discussions on politics and culture, often including the figure of Charlie Chaplin, in Brecht’s apartment. Brecht had followed Chaplin since first seeing one of his films in 1921. In Chaplin’s performance and acting technique, he saw a model through which social gestures might be defamiliarized. As he recognized, Chaplin became the crucial source for the development of the concept of Gestus. Benjamin also adopted this concept to analyse not only Brecht’s epic theatre, but also Chaplin and Kafka, the triad of authors who, for Benjamin, were to rehabilitate allegory in a technologically saturated and alienating modernity. For Benjamin, the concept of Gestus served similar purposes to allegory, as it was also structured on discontinuity and fragmentation. Gestus is a neologism coined by Brecht in contrast to the German word for gesture, Geste, to refer to the embodiment of an attitude, which is revealed through the physical gestures of the performer. Throughout his career, Brecht considered the concept in different ways. The first time he used the term was in a 1920 theatre review in which Gestus was employed to signify bodily gesture as opposed to spoken word.57 It was not until 1929 that he began to use the concept as a pillar of his theory of the epic theatre. Brecht’s assistant director Carl Weber defined it ‘as the total process, the “ensemble” of all physical behavior the actor displays when showing as a “character” on stage by way of his/her social interactions’.58 In a text written in the mid 1930s on ‘gestic music’, Brecht wrote that Gestus ‘is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes’.59 Hence, a language is gestic, says Brecht, when that language is grounded in a gesture and conveys the attitude that the speaker adopts towards other people. Chaplin was one of the most influential sources for the development of the concept. Brecht had been a great fan of Chaplin since his films were first imported to Germany in 1921. In a diary entry from 29 October 1921, Brecht enthusiastically talks about the short The Face on the Barroom Floor (1914), which he describes as ‘the most profoundly moving thing [das Erschütterndste] I’ve ever seen in the cinema: utterly simple’.60 Then, he states the qualities he perceives in Chaplin’s performance: ‘Chaplin’s 57 Weber, ‘Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition’, p. 43. 58 Ibid. 59 Brecht, ‘On Gestic Music’, in Brecht on Theatre, p. 104. 60 Paul Flaig has noted that John Willet translates erschütternd as ‘moving’, but he prefers the word ‘shocking’. In the context of our discussion, both in terms of Chaplin’s influence on Brecht, and Benjamin’s reading of both Brecht and Chaplin, the term ‘shocking’ would also better express the positive characteristics that Brecht detected in Chaplin (Flaig, ‘Brecht, Chaplin and the Comic Inheritance of Marxism’).

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face is always impassive, as though waxed over, a single expressive twitch rips it apart, very simple, strong, worried.’61 According to Weber, this early text on Chaplin is a perfect formulation of Brecht’s later postulate that ‘the actor’s face should be an empty face written on by the body’s Gestus’.62 Brecht’s indebtedness to Chaplin for this concept is even more obvious in a note that he wrote in 1931 on the production of Man Equals Man (Mann ist Mann, 1926), in which Brecht wrote: ‘The actor of the epic theatre needs an artistic economy totally different from that of the dramatic actor. In a way, Chaplin would serve the demands of the actor of the epic theatre better than those of the dramatic theatre.’63 Hence, Brecht found in Chaplin an acting technique that he could apply to the epic theatre in order to convey social commentaries. Benjamin analysed the concept of Gestus in depth in his texts on Brecht’s epic theatre. He defined Gestus as ‘dialectics at a standstill’. For Benjamin, this technique frames and encloses an attitude to interrupt the flow of real life in a way that raises astonishment (Staunen) in the audience. ‘This astonishment’, Benjamin argues, ‘is the means whereby epic theatre, in a hard, pure way, revives a Socratic praxis’, in opposition to Aristotelian psychological absorption.64 Through this astonishment, spectators are able to spot the contradictions of such a situation. In ‘The Author as Producer’, Benjamin defines the aim of epic theatre as the portrayal of situations rather than plots. The plays create the situations by interrupting the action, for example, through songs. In ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’, Benjamin argues that the truly important aspect of epic theatre is that the audience discovers the situation for the first time or that a common situation is defamiliarized and looked at from a new, more critical perspective. This defamiliarization (Verfremdung) is achieved by interrupting the action. Benjamin claims that this principle of interruption takes up the technique of montage, something familiar in recent years in media such as film and radio, but also in literature and photography. Benjamin suggests, therefore, that filmic montage has influenced other arts, such as literature, photography, and, in this case, theatre. For him, interruption is a procedure which the film medium expresses naturally through montage and which theatre can borrow and exploit. Benjamin puts it plainly when he says: ‘Brecht’s discovery and 61 Brecht, Bertolt Brecht diaries 1920–1922, pp. 140–141. 62 Weber, ‘Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition’, p. 44. 63 Brecht, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), XVII, p. 987; cited in Weber, ‘Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition’, p. 45. 64 Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theatre? [first version]’, in Understanding Brecht, p. 4.

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use of the gestus is nothing but the restoration of the method of montage decisive in radio and film, from an often merely modish procedure to a human event.’65 The similarities of the interruption principle in the epic theatre and the dialectical structure of film, in which discontinuous images replace one another in a continuous sequence, are enhanced by Benjamin in the following remark in ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’: Like the images of a film, the epic theater moves in spurts. Its basic form is that of the shock with which the individual, well-defined situations of a play collide. The songs, the captions, the gestic conventions set off one situation from another. This creates intervals which, if anything, undermine the illusion of the audience and paralyze its readiness for empathy. These intervals are provided so that the audience can respond critically to the player’s actions and the way they are presented.66

The principle of epic theatre is, as in radio and film, based on interruptions. The only difference, says Benjamin, is that the interruption in the epic theatre has a pedagogic function, whereas, in film, it has primarily the character of a stimulus. Epic theatre’s interruption ‘brings the action to a halt, and hence compels the listener to take up an attitude toward the events on the stage and forces the actor to adopt a critical view of his role’.67 By interrupting the action, the spectator is prevented from experiencing psychological absorption into the plot and can reflect on the situation performed. That distance is worked out through the Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarizing or estrangement effect), by which the alienation of the characters is reinforced and ultimately uncovered and revealed. The actors of epic theatre perform their roles to make the social gestures of the characters implicit. The spectator does not sympathize with the protagonist, as Benjamin defines: ‘instead of identifying with the protagonist, the audience should learn to feel astonished at the circumstances under which he functions.’68 Benjamin perceived a similar method in Kafka. In a conversation with Benjamin, Brecht said that Kafka always repeats the same movements: the astonishment of a man who foresees a new order in the near future and cannot find his place within it. The characters of Kafka are astonished and tinged with horror and therefore cannot describe 65 66 67 68

Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, p. 778. Benjamin, ‘What Is the Epic Theater? (II)’, SW4, p. 306. Benjamin, ‘Theater and Radio’, SW2, p. 585. Benjamin, ‘What Is the Epic Theater? (II)’, SW4, p. 304.

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any event without distortions. ‘In other words’, says Benjamin, following on Brecht, ‘everything he describes makes statements about something other than itself.’69 In his 1934 essay, Benjamin claims that ‘Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures’ and traces the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, from the novel Amerika (1927), back to Chinese theatre—studied by Brecht to develop his epic theatre—which is a theatre that dissolves the events into gestural components.70 In that theatre, the applicants—among them the novel’s main character, Karl Rossmann—are only expected to be able to play themselves. Through this mode, the conditions of a typical man in society are tested, in the same way as would happen in Brecht’s epic theatre. For that reason, Benjamin says that Kafka’s world is a world theatre and man is always on stage. The gestures performed by Kafka’s characters ultimately uncover the situations in which they are trapped. Benjamin argues that these gestures initially have no definite symbolic meaning for Kafka, but rather that he ‘tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts’.71 He concludes that Kafka can only understand things in the form of a Gestus and that this gesture, which he does not understand, ‘constitutes the cloudy part of the parables’.72 The use of animals as the characters of his stories is part of the same procedure: This animal gesture combines the utmost mysteriousness with the utmost simplicity. You can read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all. When you finally come upon the name of the creature—monkey, dog, mole—you look up in fright and realize that you are already far away from the continent of man. But it is always Kafka; he divests human gesture of its traditional supports, and then has a subject for reflection without end.73

Kafka raises astonishment in his readers by dissociating purely human gestures from the human world. In so doing, he creates a critical distance from social human behaviour, embodied in these creatures. As Benjamin writes in a 1931 diary entry, this astonishment may be either born of fear, or cause fear in others. Such fear is prefigured in the ‘law of a new order 69 Benjamin, ‘May-June 1931’, SW2, pp. 477–478. 70 Benjamin, ‘Kafka’, SW2, p. 801. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., p. 808. 73 Ibid., p. 802.

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in which all the things in which it expresses itself are misshapen, a law that deforms all things and all the people it touches’.74 In the 1934 essay, Benjamin compares Kafka’s characters and creatures to Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–1923), whose main character is astonished by everything. Finally, Benjamin compares the alienation of these figures with film technology: The invention of motion pictures and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own gait on film or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation of the subject in such experiments is Kafka’s situation; this is what leads him to study, where he may encounter fragments of his own existence—fragments that are still within the context of the role. He might catch hold of the lost gestus the way Peter Schlemihl caught hold of the shadow he had sold. He might understand himself, but what an enormous effort would be required!75

Kafka’s characters are akin to those who cannot recognize particular gestures as their own, but who nevertheless encounter fragments of their own existence, barely able to discern their alienation from others and the world. Benjamin compares the perception of fragments of one’s own social gesture through cinema and through Kafka’s characters with Peter Schlemihl. Schlemihl, who appears in an early 19th-century story, sells his shadow to gain social recognition, but eventually becomes an outcast.76 In this passage, Benjamin also consciously compares Kafka’s situations with the representation of human beings by means of the cinematographic apparatus, which, according to him, may enable ‘a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation’.77 Thus, the self-alienation produced in Kafka’s stories 74 Benjamin, ‘May-June 1931’, p. 479. 75 Benjamin, ‘Kafka’, SW2, p. 814. 76 Benjamin had alluded to the figure of Schlemihl before, in a fragmentary article entitled ‘Ibizan Sequence’, which he wrote between April and May 1932 for the Frankfurter Zeitung. In a section called ‘The Compass of Success’, Benjamin compares Chaplin with Schlemihl. Benjamin places both Chaplin and Schlemihl in a division regarding the position of different figures in relation to success. Chaplin is at the level of ‘Lack of success at the cost of abandoning every conviction’, or, to put it differently, as a genius of failure. Benjamin depicts Chaplin here as a social outcast, as someone who fails to fit in society, but who also refuses to take part in the competition for success. Benjamin refers to Chaplin-the-character (‘the tramp’ or ‘the little fellow’), rather than Chaplin-the-star (‘Ibizan Sequence’, SW2, p. 590). 77 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 113; italics in the original.

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or that felt through the use of a phonograph or film can be reversed and used as a materialist exposition of the alienation of people in everyday life. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin outlines the differences between film and stage actors. On film, the actor performs in front of a group of specialists—director, producer, technicians, and so on—instead of the audience. The intervention of the specialist in the performance of the actor is, according to Benjamin, what determines the process of film production. The action performed by the film actor can be recorded in different takes and from different angles, but it is the eventual decision at the editing table—taken by the editor, the director, the producer, and others—that will establish the final performance. Benjamin compares this aspect of filmmaking to a test. The specialists who are in front of the actor recording his performance are in the position of the testers. In the cinema, however, this role is given to the audience. In addition, the film actor feels estrangement in the face of the apparatus in the same way that a person feels estrangement in front of their image in the mirror, their gait in a film, or their voice in a phonograph. The difference, he argues, is that the mirror is, in the case of film, detachable and transportable to a place in front of the masses. The masses control and test the actor. In this process, they can also feel themselves recognized in the actor via a positive sense of estrangement. For Benjamin, the workers fill the cinemas in the evening to witness the film actor in front of an apparatus, as they have done in their workdays. If the masses have relinquished their humanity in front of the machines in their workplaces, they can now be on the other side, testing the actor and not being tested themselves. But the actor—and probably Chaplin was the most exemplary case in this regard—not only asserts his humanity against the apparatus, as the workers-cum-audience do, but also places the apparatus at the service of the proletarian masses.78 The experience of these masses, which are understood in a similar way to Brecht’s proletarian audience, can recover an experience which is now mediated but which, for that very same reason, is easier to adapt to the collective body formed by the audience. The sense of estrangement that is produced in the gap between the film actor and the spectator is what Benjamin calls the positive use of self-alienation. In her article ‘Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin’, Brigit Doherty analyses the use of this term in both authors. She argues that, in the Weimar Republic, there were many psychotechnical tests to assess the vocational aptitude of workers, jobseekers, or, more specifically, soldiers who returned home after World War I and went back to work. These psychotechnical 78 Ibid., p. 111.

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aptitude tests were extensively employed in Germany during and after the First World War, in vocational counselling agencies and psychotechnical laboratories, as well as in factories and private companies. For Benjamin, these vocational tests were designed to assess the Haltung (attitude, stance, disposition) of the workers rather than the content of the work. In this way, the tests focussed on the gestures, aptitudes, and capabilities of the workers. By reversing the aim of the tests, both Benjamin and Brecht conceived of them as representations of human types, as the dissection of persons into bodily gestures. Through this, a job could be allocated to them according to aptitude, even if this job did not exist. In short, these psychotechnical tests were a means of dissecting human behaviour and social relations through gesture and attitude, as the method of epic theatre aimed to do. In his diary entries from the summer of 1934, Benjamin mentions an anecdote that Brecht told him about the actress Carola Neher, which perfectly explains this conception. Brecht wanted to teach Neher how to wash her face. According to Brecht, Neher washed her face with the intention of not being dirty. However, in order to render the Gestus of the action itself, she had to focus instead on the bodily gestures and posture of the action and not on the goal.79 Brecht wanted to film this process of Neher acquiring the skills to wash her face, although he never did so. Through film, Brecht may have thought, the Gestus of washing one’s face would be better exposed. In fact, Doherty notes, modern technologies such as film were employed in these psychotechnical tests to assess the Haltung of soldiers and workers.80 In short, Brecht and Benjamin used the term ‘test’ by inverting the roles: The audience, many of whom had probably been subjects of these tests, was the tester, while the actor performed the role of the tested. This was part of the transformation or refunctioning (Umfunktionierung) of the medium, which both Brecht and Benjamin championed. The actors could thus dissect the persona of their characters through bodily and mental gestures. Through these gestures, they would be able to quote the attitudes of the social types they were performing. Furthermore, the audience could easily recognize those social gestures with the appraisal of an expert. In the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma in Kafka’s novel Amerika, Benjamin observed a similar function. In their performances, the applicants to the theatre, by playing themselves, dissolved their own behaviour into gestures, thereby revealing the social attitudes of the characters, in a very similar manner to Brecht’s epic theatre. 79 Benjamin, ‘Notes from Svendborg, Summer 1934’, SW2, pp. 783–784. Here, the preponderance of process over content indicates a crucial similarity to the procedure of allegory. 80 Doherty, ‘Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin’, p. 473.

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Chaplin’s Gestus The difference between Chaplin and Brecht and Kafka is that Chaplin’s performance was restricted to film—not simply to techniques borrowed from f ilm, as in the case of Brecht. In a note written in relation to the composition of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin writes: The formula in which the dialectical structure of film—film considered in its technological dimension—finds expression runs as follows. Discontinuous images replace one another in a continuous sequence. A theory of film would need to take account of both these facts. First of all, with regard to continuity, it cannot be overlooked that the assembly line, which plays such a fundamental role in the process of production, is in a sense represented by the filmstrip in the process of consumption. Both came into being at roughly the same time. The social significance of the one cannot be fully understood without that of the other.81

The structure by which the discontinuous images of cinema—frame, shot, sequence—are replaced in its reception by a continuous sequence is, for Benjamin, the same structure that is experienced by factory workers in the assembly line in the process of production. The social significance that Benjamin implies here is a therapeutic, but also educative, mimetic adaptation to the new rhythms and apperceptions of modernity. It is through this fragmentary structure that Chaplin can dissect his gestures in a similar way to the Brechtian Gestus. Benjamin too compares the stage actor and the film actor. Chaplin, who was, according to Benjamin, inherently a filmic actor, is able to render the fragmentation of his contemporaries by means of integrating his body and mental posture into the moving image: Chaplin’s way of moving [Gestus] is not really that of an actor. He could not have made an impact on the stage. His unique significance lies in the fact that, in his work, the human being is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures—that is, his bodily and mental posture. The innovation of Chaplin’s gestures is that he dissects the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations. Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits 81 Benjamin, ‘The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression’, SW3, p. 94.

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of movement. Whether it is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat—always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions.82

Benjamin analyses the fragmentation of Chaplin’s body according to the cinematic laws of discontinuity. Chaplin’s ability to dissect the expressive movements of human beings—in an age in which discontinuity of experience has become the norm—in ‘a succession of staccato bits of movements’ integrated into the film image is crucial. Human functions are fragmented and incorporated into the film image which is, in turn, a discontinuous succession of images. Ana Useros has argued that, for Benjamin, montage was not reduced to the change of shot or frame, but also included the disruptions created by the appearance of a character on-screen, or by the gestures of an actor.83 The discontinuous structure of film is not only the result of changes in frames, shots, and sequences, but also of the gestures and movements of the performers. In the famous scene from The Circus, in which Chaplin enters a funhouse mirror, although the entire scene is recorded in a single shot, the game of mirrors multiplies and disrupts Chaplin’s body. This is multiplied when the pickpocket and the policeman enter the frame to chase him. Despite the scene’s single cut, montage is achieved through the dissection of the body and gestures of the 82 Ibid. 83 Useros, ‘El misterio Chaplin’, p. 85. Useros has noted that, for contemporary spectators, cinematographic images have their own motion and duration; for Benjamin, however, the image was essentially static. In fact, he always situated temporality as a factor external to the image. For example, in a convolute of The Arcades Project, Benjamin discusses the temporal succession of film in a hypothetical experiment in which the movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares of Paris over the years would be shown in just half an hour (The Arcades Project, convolute [C1, 9], p. 83). In another convolute, Benjamin speaks of the representation of the temporal factor in panoramas through the succession of days by means of lighting tricks (Ibid., convolute [Y 10, 2], p. 690). In both cases, if one pays attention, Benjamin speaks of a temporal duration that is external to the nature of the image. For that reason, he never talked about duration in film, unless it was distorted, such as in the use of slow motion. For him, any factor coming from outside the image could create an interruption and, therefore, be conceived of as montage. Thus, in another convolute of The Arcades Project, Benjamin compares the optics of the myriorama and the time of the modern, of the newest, and describes the time of each as ‘crossed by countless intermittences’. For Benjamin, intermittence is the measure of time in film, but it also ‘means that every look in space meets with a new constellation’ (Ibid., convolute [Gº,18], p. 843). Benjamin implied, therefore, that looking, from outside or inside the image, disrupted the inner temporal dimension of film and, as a consequence, should be understood as montage.

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characters, providing a playful example of the discontinuity of experience in modernity. Many critics accused Chaplin’s films of being equivalent to recorded pantomime, as he did not actively use montage as film’s first artistic principle. Benjamin’s conception of montage, however, does not focus so much on the cut as on other disruptions within the frame, in addition to the ‘attractions’ and shocks produced by the actors’ performances. For that reason, Benjamin saw in Chaplin’s fragmentation of the human body an exemplary use of montage with which to reproduce and counteract the shock nature of modern life. Miriam Hansen defines the social output of this fragmentation by saying that Chaplin performs ‘a “gestic” rendering of the experience of perceptual and bodily fragmentation’.84 By mimicking the structure of film through the human motorial functions characteristic of modern urban life, Chaplin is integrated into the f ilmic image. His allegorical and gestural rendering is always mediated by film technology and he performs the technological experience of his generation through the very same technology of reproduction that is responsible for such an experience. Benjamin also describes Chaplin’s performance as a dissection of human movements into ‘a series of minute innervations’. Benjamin refers to the small, intermittent gestures of Chaplin’s characteristic performance, which are like little currents of energy plugged into the tramp’s body. Benjamin returns here to the idea of a ‘creative innervation’ as introduced in ‘The Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’. According to him, Chaplin transferred human expressions into physiological impulses through his body. These innervations or energetic impulses would be not only corporeal reflections of human expressions, but also a mimetic incorporation of film’s technological nature. For Hansen, this mimetic reflection fulfils a cognitive task in the period of the industrial transformation of human perception: ‘Chaplin’s exercises in fragmentation are a case in point: by chopping up expressive body movement into a sequence of minute mechanical impulses, he renders the law of the apparatus visible as the law of human movement.’85 Along this line, she argues that the representation of self-alienation was allegorical insofar as such cinematic representation could make the condition of alienation visible, readable, or even quotable in materialist terms.86 This is precisely what Benjamin refers to when he suggests that Chaplin’s performance was allegorical: ‘Dismemberment of Chaplin; he interprets 84 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, pp. 47–48. 85 Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 203. 86 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 178.

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himself allegorically.’87 Benjamin found Chaplin’s dismemberment of his own body and mental posture to be characteristic of his interpretation of an allegorical representation of the modern experience of human beings.88 In the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin identifies a surgical function in allegory, similar to the dismemberment of Chaplin mentioned above. He not only characterizes allegory as an expressive procedure able to fragment reality and unfold new meanings through the very cracks of that fragmentation, he also implies that allegory could be used to represent the body. Allegory, however, only acts upon the inorganic. For that reason, the body in allegory always appears fragmented, cut into pieces. Benjamin quotes the French heraldist Claude-François Ménestrier: ‘The whole human body cannot enter a symbolical icon, but it is not inappropriate for parts of the body to constitute it.’ Following this commentary, Benjamin states: the human body could be no exception to the commandment which ordered the destruction of the organic so that the true meaning, as it was written and ordained, might be picked up from its fragments. Where, indeed, could this law be more triumphantly displayed than in the man who abandons his conventional, conscious physis in order to scatter it to the manifold regions of meaning?89

For Benjamin, the allegorization of the body can only be enacted in the corpse, where limbs can be dismembered, and the body falls away piece by piece. The dismemberment of Chaplin finds its place in the medium of film, in which the fragmentation of his own body was made possible. Benjamin intended to devote one section of his book project on Baudelaire to allegory, which would be entitled ‘Baudelaire als Allegoriker’ (‘Baudelaire as Allegorist’). However, given the project never came to fruition, what remains is a fragmentary collection of notes called ‘Central Park’ 87 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I:3, p. 1047; quoted in Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 130. 88 Benjamin goes on to quote Philippe Soupault: ‘La canne exprimaient toute la lourdeur des soucis d’ici-bas’ (‘The cane reveals the fatigue of the lower classes’ [my translation]). Therefore, it is not only the fragmented body of Chaplin that is allegorical, but also his accoutrements, such as his cane, hat, and moustache. In the note he wrote about The Circus, Benjamin mentions that Chaplin’s clothes do not suit him and that he has not taken them off for a month (‘Chaplin’, SW2, p. 199). Thus, his attire might point to social decline, to the proletarianization of society. For Benjamin, therefore, these accoutrements carry the meaning of the anxiety and experience of the proletariat. 89 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 216–217.

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(c.1938–1939).90 In these notes, Benjamin compares seventeenth- and nineteenth-century allegory in their relation to the human body: ‘Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it also from within.’91 In the texts on Baudelaire, Benjamin focusses primarily on the commodity form. Whereas Baroque dramas were melancholy reflections on the inevitability of decay, the devaluation of the new nature became politically instructive in Baudelaire. The corpse that Baudelaire sees from within is the body that has become a commodity, a reified thing. The human body—in the era of high capitalism—is conceived of as something inorganic and here allegory acts over it in all its vigour. In ‘Central Park’, Benjamin argues that Baudelaire placed allegory in the service of the decay of the aura and the dissolution of semblance, similar to film.92 Benjamin claims that, in Baudelaire’s poetry, allegory presents itself through shock, through a coup de main—as Baudelaire describes his way of writing poetry. The traces of rage and spleen in his poetry, says Benjamin, create ruins out of the harmonious structures of the world.93 This is in contrast to the Baroque allegory. In the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin says that ‘the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways. […] Allegories become dated, because it is part of their nature to shock’.94 As I have mentioned earlier, truth in allegory unfolds in the process of representation, which must be, in turn, visibly fragmentary. In ‘Central Park’, Benjamin makes clear that one of the destructive tendencies of allegory is ‘its stress on the artwork’s fragmentary nature’.95 In the film medium, he found similar characteristics: on the one hand, the structure of film is based on a series of discontinuous images and, on the other, it has a natural propensity to shock. Bainard Cowan has argued that Baudelaire was the last poet able to employ allegory. The reason for this is that Baudelaire had a ‘distance of centuries’ from contemporary imagery. Therefore, this distance was ‘enough to induce the effect of alienation of image from context’.96 The 90 However, in his edition of Benjamin’s intended book on Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire. Un poeta lirico nell’età del capitalismo avanzato, Giorgio Agamben does not consider ‘Central Park’ to be a collection of notes for a chapter on allegory. He describes the text as ‘philosophical and methodological sketches’ and as ‘critico-philosophical reflections’, which incorporate metatextual notes about the organization and distribution of the whole text—and therefore not only of that planned chapter on allegory (p. 17). 91 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, SW4, p. 186. 92 Ibid., p. 173. 93 Ibid., p. 174. 94 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 183–184. 95 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, SW4, p. 191. 96 Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, pp. 121–122.

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contemplation of the object was still a prerequisite in Baroque literature for its allegorizing procedure, but soon became redundant in a society eager for Erlebnis. Nonetheless, Benjamin tries to revive allegory in nineteenthcentury Paris, where shock is the main experience of the flâneur. It can be argued, with due caution, that he does something similar in the 20th century with regard to cinema, in which experience has become Erlebnis or, more accurately, Chockerlebnis. In this way, both Kafka and Chaplin can be conceived of as allegorical within the same terms as Baudelaire. In the comparison of Kafka and Chaplin, Benjamin characterizes one side of their face as ‘completely immemorial, without history’, the other possessing ‘the latest, journalistic topicality’.97 From this distance, all three display their allegorical gaze at contemporaneous things on an immanent plain.

Theory of Distraction Benjamin detected a therapeutic function to film, articulated in the ‘Work of Art’ essay through an analysis of American slapstick and Disney animations. In his working notes on the ‘theory of distraction’ for the last draft, Benjamin discerns a cathartic release in the reception of film.98 For him, the mode of distraction found in film spectatorship is physiologically similar to the catharsis found in tragedy. In cinemas, the audience consumes the film as a body and releases the tensions and unconscious energies through collective laughter. The laughter of the audience is a means to release the repressions of civilization. In the sixteenth thesis of the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, he writes: If one considers the dangerous tension which technology and its consequences have engendered in the masses at large—tendencies which at critical stages take on a psychotic character—one also has to recognize that this same technologization [Technisierung] has created the possibility of psychic immunization against such mass psychoses. It does so by means of certain films in which the forced development of sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their natural and dangerous maturation in the masses. Collective laughter is one such preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis. The countless grotesque events consumed in 97 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 1198; quoted in Leslie, Walter Benjamin, pp. 119–120. 98 Benjamin, ‘Theory of Distraction’, SW3, p. 141.

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films are a graphic indication of the dangers threatening mankind from the repressions implicit in civilization. American slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies.99

Benjamin thought that, even though the technologization of everyday life had caused mass psychoses, it had also created the possibility of psychic immunization. American slapstick and Disney animation, he argued, were able to counteract those mass psychoses, especially through collective laughter, which released therapeutically unconscious energies. Horkheimer and Adorno, who always remained suspicious of this argument, recognized that laughter was ‘a medicinal bath’.100 However, according to them, this laughter was prescribed by the culture industry as a fraudulent form of happiness and as a capitulation of its own forces. This argument about the release of unconscious and destructive energies is, nonetheless, central, a necessary counterpart to the concept of innervation. According to Benjamin, if the unconscious energies engendered by the rapid technologization (Technisierung) of society are not released, they might mature into mass psychoses. A process of catharsis is thus necessary for the historical function that Benjamin attaches to film: ‘To make the enormous technological apparatus of our time an object of human innervation.’101 In this way, Benjamin conceives of the audience as a physis that must release the tensions and dangerous energies of its body, as part of the ‘tension’ and ‘release’ process of innervation, in order to adapt technology satisfactorily. However, he had to recognize that this was not always the case, that laughter was not always positive. In a footnote to the second version, he writes that the comic effect in some Disney films was tinged with horror and compared it with the depiction of people dancing in the middle of medieval pogroms.102 With this argument, Benjamin envisages the possibility that such energy could also be directed to destructive purposes, rather than used for a salutary interpenetration of the collective body formed by the audience. 99 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 118; italics in the original. 100 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 140. Horkheimer and Adorno go on to say that such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity and is suggestive of barbaric life. Benjamin was, in fact, aware of the barbarism and inhumanity inherent to collective laughter. See the final paragraph of ‘Experience and Poverty’ (SW2, p. 736). I will centre my argument about laughter in the next chapter on this point. 101 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), pp. 18–19. 102 In the next chapter, I will discuss Benjamin’s reservations about his own argument in greater depth by analysing the double nature of Mickey Mouse films and their acceptance of bestiality and violence.

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In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1940), Benjamin repeats the same argument about the filmstrip and the conveyor belt. In this passage, Benjamin emphasizes the importance of cinema as both training for the senses, in order to adapt them to the new experiences of modernity, and a response to their need for consumption: technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the film.103

In the parallelism between the assembly line in the production process and the filmstrip in reception, Benjamin implies a mimetic correspondence that allows workers to enter a cognitive process and understand their position in the system of production. At the same time, the audience trains the senses and adapts them to their everyday interaction with technology. The physiological, therapeutic function of film is, in this sense, an attempt to recover the full faculty of the senses. If the human sensorium has been deadened as a consequence of an overexposure to shock, the film aesthetics proposed by Benjamin can activate the senses under the new regime of experience. For Benjamin, technologically reproducible art changed the relation of the masses to art, transforming their generally hostile and conservative attitude towards works of avant-garde artists such as Picasso into a progressive approach to films by Chaplin.104 Since film reaches larger sections of the population, is consumed en masse, and provokes collective reactions—whether laughter or tears—Benjamin argues that criticism and enjoyment converge to a greater extent than in contemplative reception. Hence, the masses could experience pleasure in seeing the film while remaining comfortable in judging it with a certain expert appraisal, as they did in relation to sport events. This is in contrast to the contemplation of a painting by Picasso, in which enjoyment and critical appraisal were not so intimately bound, and uneducated people usually responded with aversion. In a convolute of The Arcades Project, Benjamin develops this argument further with regard to the political significance of film. In politics and art, he argues, no one will persuade the masses of something that is not immediate 103 Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW4, p. 328. 104 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 116.

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to their interests. ‘[T]hey can be won over only to one nearer to them’, he writes.105 To prove his argument, he quotes Emmanuel Berl, who claims that Picasso is a revolutionary only because he has revolutionized painting, but, as he did not win over the masses, Picasso was not revolutionary in a Leninist sense. Benjamin continues his argument by defining kitsch as art with complete and instantaneous availability for consumption. In this way, art and kitsch form as opposites. ‘But for developing, living forms’, says Benjamin, ‘what matters is that they have within them something stirring, useful, ultimately heartening—that they take “kitsch” dialectically up into themselves, and hence bring themselves near to the masses while yet surmounting the kitsch.’106 For Benjamin, film is the art form most qualified to perform this task today. He argues that the kitsch elements of film can be overcome and turned into a political weapon. In short, film is more politically effective than other art forms because it is closer to the masses. This argument must be understood in terms of his conception of the audience as a body and the reconfiguration of space brought about by film. Laughter, for example, was able to concentrate the reactions of the spectators into a mass, to empower the audience as a collective body. In the review ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, Benjamin argues that, what gains the respect of the masses, is Chaplin’s appeal ‘to the most international and the most revolutionary emotion of the masses: their laughter’.107At the end of the article, Benjamin quotes Soupault, who claims that making people laugh, apart from being the hardest thing to do, is of greatest social importance. In ‘The Author as Producer’, Benjamin characterizes the social function of laughter—in this case, with regard to Brecht—as follows: ‘convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul’.108 Although Henri Bergson has been heavily criticized for developing a highly systematic theory of the comic, his description of laughter does not differ greatly from Benjamin. For Bergson, laughter is the corrective against an individual or collective imperfection, ‘a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events’.109 Similarly, for Benjamin, laughter could also be defined as a socially critical gesture that scrutinizes and scorns both events and human beings’ behaviour. In this sense, through an unconscious release 105 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [K3a, 1], pp. 395–396. 106 Ibid. 107 Benjamin, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, SW2, p. 224. 108 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, SW2, p. 779. 109 Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, p. 39.

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of collective laughter, Benjamin thought that the audience could proceed to innervate mimetically the corrective, critical gesture in the collective body formed by the audience. Adorno and Horkheimer disagreed. For them, as Adorno stated in his famous letter to Benjamin dated 18 March 1936, collective laughter in the cinema was neither salutary nor revolutionary. Instead, it was ‘full of the worst bourgeois sadism’.110 The laughter of the audience did not produce a critical reflection on the situation of the modern man or woman with regard to technology, or a preemptive function against the mass psychoses engendered by the rapid process of technologization. Nevertheless, what Benjamin claims is that the laughter of the masses, although certainly not always critical, could at least incorporate the shocks displayed in the film without creating a defence that would paralyse the organism. In this way, the distracted and relaxed state that Benjamin associated with both Brecht’s epic theatre and film permitted the integration of the shocking and fragmentary nature of the apperceptions of modern life. Through this, the subject would be trained to confront the new stimuli with which the rhythms of the city assaulted the human body. The term that Benjamin used to develop his theory of distraction (Zerstreuung, which denotes both distraction and entertainment) has been highly controversial among Benjamin’s acquaintances and scholars over the years. For example, Howard Eiland has noticed a certain slippage in Benjamin’s use of the term.111 In essays such as ‘Theater and Radio’ (1932) and ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934), which deal with Brecht’s theatre, Benjamin understands Zerstreuung in negative terms, as part of the theatre of convention, with its complementary functions of cultivation and distraction (Bildung und Zerstreuung). The term stands, in this inculcation, for a form of bourgeois divertissement, an abandonment to diversion, in opposition to Brecht’s epic theatre, which raises critical knowledge through methods of interruption, critical distance, and the alienation effect. As Eiland notes, in these texts ‘the method of montage is opposed to that of distraction’.112 In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, however, Benjamin uses the term Zerstreuung to denote productive distraction, ‘a spur to new ways of perceiving’.113 Here, cinema acts as a training ground for the sort of reception in a state of distraction, which is symptomatic of the new kinetic apperception of all 110 111 112 113

Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 18 March 1936 (The Complete Correspondence, pp. 130–131). See Eiland, ‘Reception in Distraction’. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 59.

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aspects of everyday life. In the fragment in which Benjamin speaks of shock effects in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, he says that the interruption of the train of thought characteristic of film reception constitutes the shock effects of film, ‘which, like all shock effects, seeks to induce heightened attention’.114 Benjamin here refers to film montage in similar terms to the Brechtian techniques of interruption, and, therefore, in opposition to the former, negative attitude towards Zerstreuung. In this instance, montage appears as the vehicle for his theory of distraction. This apparent contradiction leads to a complication with the term Zerstreuung, commonly associated with a complacent divertissement, not suitable for the theory of reception that Benjamin wanted to develop with regard to film. Benjamin also used the concept Zerstreuung in The Arcades Project, embodied in three figures: the flâneur, the gambler, and the collector. The sort of distraction that is hailed in these three figures is one of intoxication. Benjamin resumes his theory of intoxication (Rausch) from the texts on hashish and the surrealists, but also from the passage about the communal intercourse of the ancients with the cosmos outlined in One Way Street (1928). The relation of these figures with the city, the game tokens, or the objects for collection is not only visual, but also tactile, involving the whole sensorium. These combinations of senses, which act in a state of distraction, are illuminated by memory. What is more, only in a state of distraction can involuntary memory recollect the traces that an external object leaves on the body.115 This type of distracted reception is similar to the one hailed by Benjamin in the cinema, a spectatorship not absorbed in the image and that only seeks entertainment from the film. Benjamin’s theories on shock effects and montage are, however, sometimes at odds with this interpretation. For it is difficult to conceptualize a simultaneously critical, Brechtian reception and one in which the distracted masses catch fleeting images in the film screen that can trigger their memory. Carolin Duttlinger has focussed on different configurations of attention in Benjamin’s theory, of which Zerstreuung is one among many. Through ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), she argues that, for Benjamin, a state of deep relaxation and extended attention was required to incorporate a story into experience (Erfahrung). Benjamin claims that storytelling was the true means for 114 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n132. 115 See also Duttlinger, ‘Between Contemplation and Distraction: Configurations of Attention in Walter Benjamin’. Carolin Duttlinger traces the uses of the term through Benjamin’s writings in a similar way to Eiland, from the texts on Brecht to The Arcades Project, through a focus on the same three figures: flâneur, gambler, and collector.

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transmitting collective experience and that the decay of storytelling corresponded to the modern loss of experience. The state of mental relaxation required for storytelling, which existed in manual labour, was eroded with the introduction of industrial labour. The historical consequence of this change in production was, for Benjamin, the emergence of the novel. The cultural background to this emergence was the novelist withdrawn into the interior, isolating the reader too in a state of passive reception. According to Duttlinger, performative media such as theatre and film represent a certain space of resistance for Benjamin, given that they built a collective community whose reception of works in a state of semi-distracted relaxation provided ‘a fertile ground for productive reception’.116 Duttlinger stresses that Benjamin was especially concerned with the revolutionary potential of a type of silent film in which the audience’s semi-alert mindset resisted complete absorption.117 According to Duttlinger, Zerstreuung shares some characteristics with the state of relaxation outlined in ‘The Storyteller’, but not all of them. Zerstreuung is intertwined with practice and routine, attentiveness and automatic response, enabling ‘the observer to take in the stream of impressions in a detached yet alert way’.118 For Duttlinger, the audience of silent films can practise this type of response to both the film screen and city life: ‘a versatile alertness able to respond to the fragmented stimuli of city life without being absorbed by them, attention in a state of distraction’.119 Therefore, in Benjamin’s ‘theory of distraction’, there is always a dialectical interplay between attention and distraction, concentration and absentmindedness, which Benjamin articulates in an ambivalent and sometimes inconsistent way.120 116 Duttlinger, ‘Benjamin’s Literary History of Attention’, p. 279. At this point, we should question the type of experience that an audience would have in cinemas. The experience provided by film is, doubtless, a shock experience (Chockerlebnis), but, according to this theory, the state of semi-relaxation might allow the spectators to incorporate some images that are incorporated unconsciously into their long experience (Erfahrung). The role of the ‘optical unconscious’ would be especially important in this regard. 117 In her essay ‘Between Contemplation and Distraction’, Duttlinger also stresses the taktische and collective nature of film in opposition to traditional, auratic works of art: ‘Where the auratic appeal of traditional art is founded on a distance between artwork and observer, film images have a dynamic, “tactile” quality, which undermines any scope for contemplative viewing, creating instead a “simultan[e] Kollektivrezeption”’ (p. 41). 118 Duttlinger, ‘Benjamin’s Literary History of Attention’, p. 281. 119 Ibid. 120 There are also many similarities between Benjamin’s ‘theory of distraction’ and Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘cult of distraction’ (Kult der Zerstreuung). Firstly, Kracauer, in a similar fashion to Benjamin, situates the masses’ addiction to distraction in the tensions to which the working masses are subjected. These tensions are compensated for by their own distraction and

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Adorno harshly criticized Benjamin’s theory of distraction. In the letter mentioned above, Adorno states that, ‘[i]n spite of its startling seductiveness’, he did not find Benjamin’s conception ‘at all convincing’.121 The first argument contends that a spectator could not become an expert in film in the same way that a newspaper boy who, leaning on his bicycle, discusses a cycle race with his friends, as Benjamin put it in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. The second argument situated Benjamin’s theses in a communist society in which human beings would no longer be exhausted or stupefied, no longer in need of such a distraction. Adorno overlooks the first thesis of the essay, in which Benjamin makes clear that his assessments about the changes in culture according to the transformations in the conditions of production ‘did not call for theses on the art of the proletariat after its seizure of power’ nor for ‘the art of the classless society’, but rather ‘for theses defining the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production’.122 Adorno, in this sense, avoids a discussion of Benjamin’s argument in the light of Aktualität. Furthermore, he reduces the term Zerstreuung to the abandonment of distraction mentioned above. Adorno was nonetheless right to doubt Benjamin’s ‘theory of distraction’ and his automatically positive endorsement of collective laughter. Benjamin failed to account for the fact that laughter was, to some extent, carefully manufactured by the culture industry. Some years later, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment that ‘[a]musement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work’.123 They argue that entertainment was pursued as an escape from the mechanization of work only in order to gather the strength required to cope with work again. The reactions of the audience, they claimed, were already prescribed by the products themselves. For that reason, the experiences of the workers in their leisure time were only after-images of the work process. entertainment in film. Kracauer is, to some extent, also ambivalent with regard to the positive and negative elements of the distraction of the masses in the cinemas. On the one hand, he understands that this sort of cultural reception is characteristic of the economic and social reality and, thus, refrains from making any ‘self-pitying’ complaint. Kracauer also reflects on the rapid stimulation of the senses, which leaves no room for contemplation and, indeed, reveals ‘in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions’ the reality that the masses have to confront, making the disorder of society visible (‘Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces’, in The Mass Ornament, p. 326). On the other hand, Kracauer laments that this distraction is used as an end in itself, by hiding the reflection of the anarchy of the world and amalgamating the ‘wide range of effects’ into an aesthetic totality, forcing the reality ‘back into a unity that no longer exists’ (pp. 327–328). 121 Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 18 March 1936 (The Complete Correspondence, pp. 130–131). 122 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 101. 123 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 137.

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However, in the letter exchange around the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Adorno misses the central point of Benjamin’s ‘theory of distraction’ and, therefore, the debate split into two different lines of argument. Thus, Adorno does not fully grasp the role of Benjamin’s ‘theory of distraction’ within his film aesthetics, which aimed at a collective innervation and the transformation of the senses of the audience by a more bodily engagement with the work of art. The ‘theory of distraction’ outlined by Benjamin introduces the state of attention that the spectators need in order to absorb the film image into themselves positively. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s argument in this regard presents some lacunae and inconsistencies through his ambivalent use of the term Zerstreuung. Some questions, however, remain unanswered. For example, what is the role of the audience: Do the images automatically activate the critical response of the semi-alert spectators or, by contrast, are they able to react critically precisely because they are not totally absorbed by the images? The other question that arises is whether this theory is valid for any type of film. The choice of American slapstick and Disney animation suggests that Benjamin ascribed this function to certain specific comedies. These, however, were not the only problems that emerged from the theory, as I will discuss in the next chapter with regard to Disney.

The Mechanization of the Body Although Benjamin was clear on the critical function of laughter, he could not explain how it is induced. He asks of Chaplin: ‘what is it about this behavior that is distinctively comic?’124 For Benjamin, there was a clear connection between laughter and the mechanical, but the reason why remained elusive. In his essay on the comic, Le Rire (1900), Henri Bergson wrote that the idea of an artificial mechanization of the human body produces laughter. For him, ‘[t]he attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine’.125 This might answer Benjamin’s question regarding Chaplin’s mechanical movements, but, as Michael North notes, Bergson’s theory derives comedy from the hostility of organic life towards machines, whereas Benjamin was less antagonistic towards technology.126 Whatever the intricacies of this 124 Benjamin, ‘The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression’, SW3, p. 94. 125 Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, p. 13. 126 North, Machine-Age Comedy, p. 4.

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argument, the connection that we can establish between comic effect and allegory is precisely the thingly (dinglich), reified character of the body.127 As I argue above, allegory acts more effectively over an inorganic body and, in the case of Baudelaire, over a body that has been penetrated by the commodity form. In his writings on Baudelaire, Benjamin suggests that the genuine gaze of allegory is able to expose the mere fact of reification in capitalism, by which human processes turn into dead objects.128 Chaplin’s allegorical performance exposes such a process, quoting the mental and bodily reification of his contemporaries under capitalism.129 Chaplin’s particular mode of movement has always been characterized as mechanical, his gestures pertaining more to those of a machine or an automaton than to a human being. But he also interpreted the mechanization—and consequent reification—of the body in a number of films. In his review of The Circus (1928), Benjamin praises Chaplin’s imitation of a fairground marionette in the long chase scene in the amusement park between the police, a thief, and the little tramp. After escaping his chasers, a pickpocket and a policeman, in the funhouse mirror, Chaplin manages to run out of the fairground ride. However, another officer is policing the exit and he is unable to escape. In order to elude the authorities, he disguises himself as a carnival automaton. The pickpocket, however, recognizes him, but, as both have to deceive the officer, Chaplin convinces him to copy the mechanical movements of the marionette and takes the opportunity to hit him with a club and knock him out. Benjamin analyses this sequence concisely: 127 I am indebted to Prof. Gerard Visser for making me aware of this connection. In his writing on the fetishism of commodities, Marx argues that: ‘To the producers […] the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, I, p. 166). The social relations that appear reified are here, therefore, both the object of allegory and of humour, understood in its most positive version (paraphrasing Bergson) as a social corrective to that reification. 128 Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, p. 121. 129 Antonis Balasopoulos has argued that the sociohistorical relevance of Charlie Chaplin to Weimar Critical Theory was precisely his discourse on and of the body: about its uses, violations, and automatism under capitalism. Through an ‘emphasis on corporeal fragmentation’, on ‘the disarticulation of organic unities and boundaries’, and the reassembling of the body in new configurations—as a corporeal analogue to filmic montage—Balasopoulos claims that Benjamin and Kracauer conceptualized Chaplin as a utopian counterforce to reification. His films, seen through the prism of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, he argues, presented the audience with the fragmented images of a detotalized world and made the spectators conscious of their own process of self-estrangement (Balasopoulos, ‘“Utopian and Cynical Elements”: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory’).

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Charlie has grown older since his last f ilm. But he also acts old. And the most moving thing about this new film is the feeling that Chaplin now has a clear overview of his possibilities and is resolved to work exclusively within these limits to attain his goal. At every point the variations on his greatest themes are displayed in their full glory. The chase is set in a maze; his unexpected appearance would astonish a magician; the mask of noninvolvement turns him into a fairground marionette…130

Benjamin transcribes the fragment above from the notes composed after seeing the film. But he does not develop his points about the chase scene, the funhouse mirror, the marionette, and the scene in which the tramp appears in the cabin usually reserved for a woman, thus surprising the magician. It is not very clear either what Benjamin means by ‘the mask of noninvolvement’. Owen Hatherley suggests that it refers to what is inhuman or machinic in Chaplin’s movements.131 Tom Gunning has described the same scene along the same line: ‘Chaplin imitates perfectly the stiff motions of this machine, its jerk of inertia between jolts of movement, its sense of endless repetition and, perhaps most hilariously, the grotesque expression the machine makes when it tries to imitate human laughter.’132 This grotesque part of Chaplin’s mechanic movements must be part of the inhumanity that critics like Gilbert Seldes, among others, associated with Chaplin, despite his advertised sentimentality and universal human condition.133 This point takes Benjamin back to his definition of slapstick in his ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’ (1927), in which he argues that the genre principally targets technology and that ‘the laughter it provokes hovers over an abyss of horror’.134 This horror, which borders inhumanity, is present in Chaplin’s performance of the mechanization of the human body, which has become paradigmatic of experience under late capitalism. Chaplin’s most famous example of the mechanization of the body is in Modern Times (1936), a film released only a few months after Benjamin wrote the ‘Work of Art’ essay. This film performs a Brechtian Gestus to render visible the alienation of the human body in capitalist modernity. In his letter from 18 March 1936, Adorno alluded to Modern Times, having 130 Benjamin, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, SW2, p. 222; ‘Chaplin’, SW2, p. 199. 131 Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine, p. 42. 132 Gunning, ‘Chaplin and the Body of Modernity’, pp. 8–9. 133 Seldes wrote that Chaplin is not human in his popular book Movies for the Millions (1937) (see the section ‘Comic Anti-Humanism’, in Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine, pp. 36–49). 134 Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, SW2, p. 17.

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already seen the film in London, where it had been released one month earlier. Adorno reiterates his belief that Chaplin should not be considered to be an avant-garde artist, ‘even’ after Modern Times.135 With that ‘even’, Adorno acknowledges that there were valuable elements in the f ilm. However, he thought those critical aspects would not attract the attention of the audience. According to Adorno, this could be recognized in the laughter of the spectators. For him, the proletarians who formed the audience represented an objectif ied subjectivity, unable to deduce the positive elements of the film for themselves. In the letter, Adorno refers to Lenin to argue that the proletariat would only develop consciousness ‘through the theory introduced by intellectuals as dialectical subjects’.136 The laughter that Adorno heard in the cinema proved nothing but an alienated subjectivity. Benjamin never mentioned Modern Times in his texts.137 Notwithstanding this fact, the film has often been associated with the ‘Work of Art’ essay, because it deals precisely with the psychoses of assembly-line workers and can easily be related to his ‘theory of distraction’.138 Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that he first had the idea for Modern Times when a reporter from the New York World told him about healthy young men from the countryside who went to work in Detroit and, after four or five years in the factory system, became nervous wrecks.139 The film depicts the misadaptation to technology of a factory worker. The character has a nervous breakdown and, after he recovers, he is arrested, having been mistaken for a political agitator. In the police car, he meets a young girl who is also a social outcast and, together, they try to cope with the difficulties of modern times in an age of economic depression. Chaplin works in an assembly line tightening screws. When the character takes a break, his discontinuous movements continue, as though quoting the mechanical dependence of factory workers on the speedy assembly line. These jerky movements Chaplin performs can be defined as the Gestus of a worker, by 135 Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 18 March 1936 (The Complete Correspondence, pp. 130–131). 136 Ibid., p. 129. 137 The film was not released in France until 24 September 1936, after the completion of the two first versions of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, the notes around it, and its publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in the French translation by Pierre Klossowski. 138 Some texts that analyse Modern Times through Benjamin are: Howe, ‘Charlie Chaplin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’; McCall, ‘“The Dynamite of a Tenth of a Second”: Benjamin’s Revolutionary Messianism in Silent Film Comedy’; Balasopoulos, ‘“Utopian and Cynical Elements”: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory’; and Useros, ‘El misterio Chaplin’. 139 Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 415.

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which his bodily and mental alienation in a factory is made visible.140 In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Benjamin quotes Marx’s Capital to argue that machinery gives workers a technologically concrete form, through which ‘workers learn to coordinate “their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton”’.141 Chaplin’s Gestus is an instance of this process by which the worker learns to act as an automaton, a worker who, Benjamin reminds us later, has been sealed off from experience. The mimetic repetition of the gestures of a machine, as with the workers in the assembly line, is a defensive mechanism that numbs the senses and paralyses the adaptation of the human being to the external world. However, by consciously performing that mimicking of the factory worker on the screen, Chaplin makes his numbing and psychopathological mimesis readable. Furthermore, he educates the masses in the structure of film and its stimuli, similar to the rhythms imposed by the assembly line. Through Chaplin, then, the audience could be educated in the rhythms imposed by technology in a playful way and, hence, reverse the sensory alienation of the worker, along with the numbing of their senses, and the disintegration of their experience. In the following sequence, Chaplin tries an automatic feeding machine to allow him to carry on working without stopping for a break. The machine, however, shows its inability to perform its function. The factory’s boss eventually rejects the machine, but only because ‘it’s not practical’. In that scene, Chaplin mocks Taylorist scientific management and the attempt to rationalize and mechanize all human movements. In the late afternoon, the boss decides to speed up the assembly line to increase production, but Chaplin becomes more obsessed with tightening screws and loses control over himself. He then enters the gear assembly in the famous scene set in the wheels of the mechanism, finally falling into a nervous breakdown. Michael North has equated the two-dimensional and unrealistic depiction of the gears of the steel mill with that of a film projector, although it could also be a film camera, and Chaplin is the film strip travelling over the sprockets. Benjamin’s parallel between film strip and the assembly line finds a plastic realization in this scene. If, whilst working on the assembly line, Chaplin needs to keep up with the accelerating beltway to twist screws, inside the gear, he only makes ‘one tiny adjustment to each “frame” as it passes’.142 Here, 140 This connection has already been noted by other scholars (see, for example, Useros, ‘El misterio Chaplin’, p.82; and Balasopoulos, ‘“Utopian and Cynical Elements”: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory’, p. 342). 141 Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW4, p. 328. 142 North, Machine-Age Comedy, p. 187.

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the laws of continuity and discontinuity of film and the assembly line are mimetically repeated in Chaplin’s own body. North reads this as ‘Chaplin’s self-subjection to the filmmaking process’, as well as a self-reflexive comment on the process by which Chaplin was being turned into a commodity.143 Modern Times stands in here for Benjamin’s understanding of film in an age of impoverished experience. However, by equating film technology with industrial-capitalist technology, Chaplin includes film within his pessimistic repudiation of machines, rejecting Benjamin’s argument that film can be an antidote to the negative effects of technology. Chaplin, in this sense, would be more sceptical about the role of film technology as a medium to educate workers in their relationship to machines. Notwithstanding Chaplin’s view of technology, Benjamin ascribed significance to his films, both as a representation of people’s relation to machines and as a medium in which the collective can better innervate technology. The allegorical function that Benjamin detected in Chaplin can be said, on the one hand, to represent the mental and bodily reification of his contemporaries and, on the other, to recover—through the mediation of the film apparatus—an experience lost to automation. As with Kafka’s parables, Chaplin’s allegorical performance of this experience redeems hidden and forgotten elements of the past, or from a time immemorial—‘the paradise of childhood’, as Eisenstein put it. Mickey Mouse presents, by contrast, a totally barbaric experience, a tabula rasa from which a new (in)humanism could be born.

Bibliography Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought, 60 (1984), pp. 111–124. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence (1928–1940), ed. by Henri Lonitz, trans. by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Antonis Balasopoulos, ‘“Utopian and Cynical Elements”: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory’, in Futurescapes: Space in Utopian and Science Fiction Discourses, ed. by Ralph Pordzik (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 327–358. Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: ‘The Visible Man’ and ‘The Spirit of Film’, ed. by Erica Carter, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010). Tim Beasley-Murray, ‘On Some Seminal Motifs in Walter Benjamin: Seed, Sperm, Modernity, and Gender’, Modernism/modernity, 19:4 (2012), pp. 775–791. 143 Ibid.

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Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985). — The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). — Understanding Brecht, trans. by Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), I (1996). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), II (1999). — The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), III (2002). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), IV (2003). — Charles Baudelaire. Un poeta lirico nell’età del capitalismo avanzato, ed. by Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Chitussi, and Clemens-Carl Härle (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2012). Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2007). Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. by John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978). — Bertolt Brecht diaries 1920–1922, ed. by Herta Ramthun, trans. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1987). Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (London: The Bodley Head, 1964). Bainard Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, New German Critique, 22 (1981), pp. 109–122. Brigit Doherty, ‘Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin’, MLN, 115:3 (2000), pp. 442–481. Carolin Duttlinger, ‘Between Contemplation and Distraction: Configurations of Attention in Walter Benjamin’, German Studies Review, 30:1 (2007), pp. 33–54. — ‘Benjamin’s Literary History of Attention: Between Reception and Production’, Paragraph, 32:3 (2009), pp. 273–291. Howard Eiland, ‘Reception in Distraction’, boundary 2, 30:1 (2003), pp. 51–66. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, trans. by André Cabaret (Paris: Circé, 2013).

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Paul Flaig, ‘Brecht, Chaplin and the Comic Inheritance of Marxism’, The Brecht Yearbook, 35 (2010), pp. 38–59. Tom Gunning, ‘Chaplin and the Body of Modernity’, BFI Chaplin Research Programme (2004), available online at (accessed 19 September 2019). Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 179–224. — Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). — Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 2012). Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde (London: Pluto Press, 2016). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2000). Lawrence Howe, ‘Charlie Chaplin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Reflexive Ambiguity in Modern Times’, College Literature, 40:1 (2013), pp. 45–65. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1995). Esther Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’, Journal of Design History, 11:1 (1998), pp. 5–13. — Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000). — Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. and ed. by T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts & Co., 1963). — Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976–1981), I (1976). Tom McCall, ‘“The Dynamite of a Tenth of a Second”: Benjamin’s Revolutionary Messianism in Silent Film Comedy’, in Benjamin’s Ghosts, ed. by Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 74–94. Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Lloyd Spencer, ‘Allegory in the World of the Commodity: The Importance of Central Park’, New German Critique, 34 (1985), pp. 59–77. Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought, trans. by Michael Winkler (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). Ana Useros, ‘El misterio Chaplin’, in Mundo Escrito: 13 Derivas desde Walter Benjamin, ed. by Juan Barja and César Rendueles (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2013), pp. 73–89.

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Carl Weber, ‘Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition’, in Brecht Sourcebook, ed. by Carol Martin and Henry Bial (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 43–49. Samuel Weber, ‘Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth and Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play’, MLN, 106:3 (1991), pp. 465–500. Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Christine Shuttleworth (London: Libris, 2009). Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1994).

5.

Mickey Mouse: Utopian and Barbarian Abstract This chapter explores Walter Benjamin’s writings on Mickey Mouse, focussing especially on the unpublished note ‘Mickey Mouse’ (1931), ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939). These texts are read in conjunction with other essays from the period, such as ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) and ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931), since Benjamin detected in the anarchic, destructive, and technologically driven figure of the early Mickey Mouse a similar project to overcome bourgeois civilization and, especially, the individual subjectivity upon which humanism was based. The chapter also draws on some references to Disney films as dream images in the Arcades Project (1928–1940). Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Mickey Mouse; ‘Experience and Poverty’; positive concept of barbarism; dream images; J.J. Grandville.

Walter Benjamin first mentions Mickey Mouse in 1931, in a note written in light of a conversation with Kurt Weill and Benjamin’s close friend, the banker Gustav Glück, drafted under the title ‘Zu Micky Maus’. From this point until 1936, when he mentions Disney films for the last time in the second version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Mickey Mouse occupies a significant, if secondary, position in Benjamin’s writings on cinema and experience. This short-lived presence mirrors the general fascination of intellectuals with this popular figure, which soon waned. Only Sergei M. Eisenstein would continue to defend Disney until the early 1940s.1 During the 1930s, Benjamin collected a number of German and French newspaper clips on Disney, which aided his argument around Mickey Mouse in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) and in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. Disney often appears in Benjamin’s work alongside Charlie Chaplin, 1

See North, Machine-Age Comedy, p. 54.

Mourenza, D., Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462980174_ch05

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since both are associated with the therapeutic function of laughter. He was not alone. The journalist Harry Carr quoted Walt Disney in a 1931 article for the American Magazine in which he acknowledged his debt to Chaplin on the creation of Mickey Mouse: ‘We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin […] a little fellow trying to do the best he could.’2 Although both characters constantly struggle with authority, their approach to reality and to the problems they face are at odds. Furthermore, given that one was a living actor and the other a drawn cartoon, the production of their films pushed different techniques of reproduction.3 Although this did not prevent journalists from drawing comparisons, some of them accounted for the specificities of animation. Creighton Peet, for example, wrote that Disney cartoons: are ‘free’ in the fullest and most intelligent sense of the term. They know neither space, time, substance nor the dignity of the laws of physics. They are the quintessence of action. They thumb their beautiful, elastic noses at the very movies between which they are sandwiched. While even Charlie Chaplin must contend with a more or less material world, Mickey Mouse and his companions of the ‘Silly Symphonies’ live in a special cosmos of their own in which the nature of matter changes from moment to moment. 4

Benjamin quickly understood the popular significance of Mickey Mouse. The first Mickey Mouse film to be premiered in Germany, The Barn Dance (dir. Walt Disney, 1929), was released on 7 January 1930. First shown as a lead-up to feature films, entire programmes were soon devoted to Mickey Mouse and other Disney productions. In 1931, under the influence of Gustav Glück, Benjamin sketched the most important points through which he would approach this film icon in the coming years. Glück’s influence on Benjamin during this period should not be underestimated. Apart from being one of Benjamin’s closest friend, he was a relevant inspiration for 2 Harry Carr, ‘The Only Unpaid Movie Star’, American Magazine, March 1931; reproduced in A Mickey Mouse Reader, p. 38. The editor of the Reader, however, suspects that Carr might not have interviewed Walt Disney. 3 Michael North criticizes Benjamin for not paying attention to the way that animation was produced through technologies of reproduction and the resulting form of humour that their mechanization brought about (see Machine-Age Comedy, pp. 58–59 and 83). 4 Creighton Peet, ‘Miraculous Mickey’, Outlook and Independent, 23 July 1930; reproduced in A Mickey Mouse Reader, p. 30.

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his writings. In a letter to Scholem, Benjamin described ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) as a portrait of Glück, which should be taken with a grain of salt.5 Glück was also in Karl Kraus’s circle and may have introduced him to Benjamin.6 For this reason, Benjamin’s essay on ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931) is dedicated to Glück. Glück’s influence, however, goes beyond the personal and imbues Benjamin’s writings from that period. It is no coincidence that Benjamin’s theorization of Mickey Mouse is intimately connected with the latter two texts, written the same year, and with other theoretical concerns that are present in his oeuvre around this time, particularly until 1933. Benjamin’s project in this period was to overcome the centrality of the human figure and, more importantly, individual subjectivity in bourgeois humanism. To that purpose, he envisaged the figures of the Unmensch and the barbarian. For Benjamin, Mickey Mouse was an exponent of a new, positive concept of barbarism, not far from the figure of the Unmensch. Through Mickey Mouse, Benjamin exemplified his theory of the creation of a collective body through an innervation in the medium of technology. His critique of bourgeois humanism gave rise to imagery of alternative imbrications of technology and the human body. It is no accident that Benjamin’s Mickey Mouse has been recently considered as a precursor of post-humanism.7 The 1931 note, entitled ‘Mickey Mouse’ (‘Zu Micky Maus’), presents a number of themes that were later developed in subsequent texts: a comparison between Mickey Mouse and fairy tales; the representation of property relations and human alienation in the cartoon; the radical loss of experience; and a critique of bourgeois humanism, based on the characters’ rejection of anthropomorphism. The latter themes are explored further in ‘Experience and Poverty’ and its first, handwritten version ‘Erfahrungsarmut’ (‘Poverty of Experience’ [1933]), which contains references to Mickey Mouse that are partially omitted in the final, published version. In these two texts, Benjamin introduces the figure of Mickey Mouse in the debates surrounding 5 Letter to Gerhard Scholem, 28 October 1931 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 386). 6 Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, p. 351. 7 See Mourenza, ‘On Some Posthuman Motifs in Walter Benjamin: Mickey Mouse, Barbarism and Technological Innervation’, where I develop the links between Benjamin’s critique of bourgeois humanism through the figure of Mickey Mouse and recent theories about post-humanism. Miriam Hansen already suggested that Benjamin saw in Mickey Mouse a post-humanist fantasy (Cinema and Experience, p. 181). Other texts in which Benjamin scholars have observed this connection are the following: Khatib, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Figures of De-Figuration’; Charles, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Inhumanities: Towards a Pedagogical Anti-Nietzscheanism’; and Salzani, ‘Introduzione: Sopravvivere alla civiltà con Mickey Mouse e una risata’.

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experience in modernity. He reflects on the collective character of Mickey Mouse and the display of these cartoons as ‘dream images’ for cinema audiences. More importantly, he places Mickey Mouse within a new stage in which experience and culture have been impoverished. Far from lamenting this poverty, Benjamin develops a new, positive concept of barbarism, which rises from the ashes of a decadent bourgeois culture. This new culture, he argues, must break with tradition and develop new art forms that both reflect on and transform the technologically saturated environment of the time. Benjamin identifies Mickey Mouse as an empowering figure, capable of making the collective dream of new and utopian uses for technology, as well as providing the energy that people lack in reality and which could be channelled for his project of collective innervation. For this reason, Mickey Mouse became one of the cinematographic figures of the first and second versions of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, although he was eventually withdrawn from the third version on Adorno’s suggestion. Mickey Mouse also appears fleetingly in The Arcades Project (1927–1940). Benjamin introduces him in the notes to this historiography of the nineteenth century in relation to two prominent figures of this project: the utopian thinker Charles Fourier and the French caricaturist J. J. Grandville. For Benjamin, both figures were able to criticize and unveil the nature of the society they were living in, whilst also providing the space and energy to imagine another world. In this way, they can also be argued to form part of Benjamin’s project for a new kind of humanism that he developed in opposition to both bourgeois classical humanism and Nietzsche’s superhuman (Übermensch). There are several notes that prove the connection that Benjamin established between Mickey Mouse and these two figures. Benjamin mentions Mickey Mouse in a convolute of The Arcades Project in relation to Fourier’s conception of nature: For the purpose of elucidating the Fourierist extravagances, we may adduce the figure of Mickey Mouse, in which we find carried out, entirely in the spirit of Fourier’s conceptions, the moral mobilization of nature. Humor, here, puts politics to the test. Mickey Mouse shows how right Marx was to see in Fourier, above all else, a great humorist. The cracking open of natural teleology proceeds in accordance with the plan of humor.8

Benjamin detected in Fourier and Mickey Mouse a political project that mobilized humour to challenge hegemonic conceptions of nature and 8 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [W8a, 5], p. 635.

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history. Marx wrote that Fourier ‘was the first to mock the idealization of the petty bourgeoisie’.9 But it was Engels who named Fourier as a satirist: ‘Fourier is not only a critic; his eternal sprightliness makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time.’10 Benjamin understood that Fourier satirized the organization of society and the bourgeois ideology which sustained it. In one of the first convolutes devoted to Fourier in The Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes an autobiographical statement by Fourier: ‘if I am worth nothing when it comes to practicing business, I am worth something when it comes to unmasking it.’11 Benjamin also cites Plekhanov in connection with Fourier, arguing that Fourier was the only contemporary of Hegel who saw through bourgeois relations as clearly as Hegel did.12 In this sense, Fourier remained useful in unmasking and dissecting the bourgeoisie. At the same time, he dreamed of oceans of lemonade, humans swimming like fish in the water, and flying like birds in the air, able to transform themselves into amphibians, with a life span of at least 144 years.13 In Fourier’s criticism, there was also a will to transform society and to pose utopian demands, which may be in or out of reach, but which could provide the energy for such a revolutionary project. In this way, Mickey Mouse stands alongside Fourier as an example that parodies the ruling conception of nature and technology, stimulating the imagination towards new forms of conceiving them. In Fourier’s extravaganzas, Benjamin found a model for his project of exploding the progressive, teleological vision of history and nature. For this reason, he cites Fourier in the theses ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) in order to criticize the vulgar Social-Democratic and Marxist conception of labour as the positivistic mastery of nature and the deterministic vision of progress as a result of that exploitation. In opposition to this conception, Benjamin defends the kind of collective labour promoted by Fourier, which, far from exploiting nature, would help nature ‘give birth to the creations that now lie dormant in her womb’ and ‘would increase efficiency to such an extent that four moons would illuminate the sky at night, the polar ice caps would recede, seawater would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding’.14 Fourier thus illustrates a different relation of 9 Ibid., convolute [W4, 2], p. 626. 10 Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (London: Bookmarks, 1993), p. 67; quoted in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [W3a, 3], p. 625. 11 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [W1, 2], p. 621. 12 Ibid., convolute [W2a, 7], p. 624. 13 Ibid., convolute [W1a], p. 621. 14 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, SW4, p. 394.

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human beings to nature, closer to Benjamin’s own politics. In a convolute from The Arcades Project, Benjamin compares Fourier’s propagation of the phalansteries through explosions with his own political theories: ‘the idea of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective (analogy with the child who learns to grasp by trying to get hold of the moon), and the idea of the “cracking open of natural teleology”.’15 The idea of the technological innervation into a collective body appears here in relation, first, to the mimetic disjunction that Benjamin perceives in utopian projects and, secondly, to the project to blast out the deterministic vision of history and nature. Fourier emerges as an important theoretical source for Benjamin’s political and utopian project and Mickey Mouse, as its visual realization. Benjamin compares Disney not only with Fourier, but also with Grandville. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes a number of passages from an article entitled ‘Grandville: le précurseur’ (1934), written by Pierre MacOrlan. This article introduces Grandville as a precursor to surrealism and extends his influence on film, specifically on Méliès and Walt Disney. MacOrlan claims that Grandville had been the first artist to have given dreams a reasonable plastic form. Despite the candid perfection of his designs, he writes, an impression of strangeness gives them the sort of anxiety common to all dreams.16 MacOrlan argues that a tragic sign is always present in his illustrations. Thus, he suggests that Grandville’s humour always carries within itself seeds of death.17 On this point, Grandville and Disney differ, for the latter, says MacOrlan, is not melancholic, does not bear any germ of mortification. Perhaps under the influence of this article, Benjamin adds that Grandville’s designs tended towards allegory.18 Grandville masks nature with the fashions of his age just as Benjamin sees secularization of history in the context of nature. In his designs, Benjamin saw a graphic manifestation of the concept of ‘natural history’ that he had envisaged in the Trauerspiel book. For Adorno, the totality of Benjamin’s thought could actually be characterized by the term ‘natural history’.19 With the dual polarity of this concept, based on myth and transience, Benjamin looked at ephemeral objects as if they were mythical. As Adorno writes, he was ‘driven not merely to awaken congealed life in petrified objects—as in allegory—but also to scrutinize living things 15 Benjamin, Arcades Project, convolute [W7, 4], p. 631. 16 MacOrlan, ‘Grandville le précurseur’, p. 22. 17 Ibid., p. 24; quoted by Benjamin in The Arcades Project, convolute [B4a, 2], p. 72. 18 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [G16, 3], pp. 200–201. 19 Adorno, Prisms, p. 233.

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so that they present themselves as being ancient, “ur-historical” and abruptly release their significance’.20 Benjamin discerned a representation of his own concept of ‘natural history’ in Grandville and Mickey Mouse, whereby commodities were paraded as part of nature and nature was presented as transitory as fashion. Furthermore, Grandville unfolds—like Fourier and Mickey Mouse—through the parabolic humour of his depictions of the mores and fashions of his contemporaries, the wonders and anxieties of a society that was increasingly governed by the commodity form.

‘The Destructive Character’ Benjamin’s interest in Mickey Mouse first arose during one of the most anarchic, destructive, and pessimistic periods of his life. This period of his career can be perfectly expressed through the title of an article written for the Frankfurter Zeitung in November 1931, ‘The Destructive Character’.21 In this short text, he calls for a radicalization of natural destruction to further the impoverishment of experience that he had detected after the First World War, later developed in ‘Experience and Poverty’. In this way, Benjamin champions a destruction that clears away and roots out the traces of that age. This destructive impulse is not a ‘Romantic nihilism’ that praises destruction for destruction’s sake. On the contrary, it is rather, as Irving Wohlfarth has defined it, an ‘effective nihilism’.22 This constructive destruction aims at the creation of a tabula rasa in which the principles of bourgeois culture—tradition, preservation, comfort—are effaced. This tabula rasa, created by the destructiveness of the ‘destructive character’, has an important function in the positive adaptation of technology for the collective. Benjamin characterizes this ‘destructive character’ as the enemy of the étui-man, the bourgeois subject who looks for comfort in a velvet-lined interior. To illustrate the attitude of the ‘destructive character’, Benjamin borrows Brecht’s phrase ‘erase the traces’ from a poem in Reader for City-dwellers (Lesebuch für Städtebewohner, 1926–1927). Through that motif, to which he returns in ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin criticizes the bourgeois interior, which retains the marks of its owner, in the ornaments 20 Ibid. 21 Eiland and Jennings, in their biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, use the same heading, ‘The Destructive Character’, to refer to the same period, although dates vary slightly, for they talk about 1929–1932. 22 Wohlfarth, ‘No-Man’s-Land: On Walter Benjamin’s “Destructive Character”’, p. 54.

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and decorations of the house, and compels the inhabitant to adopt certain habits. The opposite attitude is pursued in the glass architecture of Paul Scheerbart or the use of steel by the Bauhaus. With the use of these materials, the ability to leave traces is diminished. Benjamin reads these examples as attempts to break with a bourgeois tradition that forces everyone to assume predetermined patterns. Benjamin embraces the ‘destructive character’ as it employs different materials and imagines different spaces to those that are passed from generation to generation. ‘The Destructive Character’ is, however, also an obscure text that flirts with the idea of suicide. Benjamin had planned to commit suicide earlier in that year, but he did not carry it out. The explanation for this must lie in the last sentence of the article: ‘The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.’23 Such a profound negativity turns into the possibility of utilizing such destructive energy in a new, positive concept of barbarism. This idea, which is further developed in the essay ‘Experience and Poverty’, had already been envisaged in relation to Mickey Mouse in the handwritten note from the same year. In the latter text, Benjamin argues that Mickey Mouse films ‘disavow experience more radically than ever before’.24 Mickey Mouse is here paired with destructiveness. In his reflections on Disney, Eisenstein came to similar conclusions. For him, Disney’s creations were made ‘on the conceptual level of man not yet shackled by logic, reason, or experience’.25 Eisenstein thought the synthetic quality to the cartoon image was crucial: ‘Disney (and it’s not accidental that his films are drawn) is a complete return to a world of complete freedom (not accidentally fictitious), freed from the necessity of another primal extinction.’26 As Benjamin puts it in ‘The Destructive Character’, the traces of one’s age should be cleared away to make room and to let in some fresh air. Like Eisenstein, he also celebrated the tabula rasa from which Disney’s figures emerged. For him, Mickey Mouse was an ambassador of the positive potentials opened up by the poverty of experience that he theorized during those years. In ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin reflects in more depth on the decay of long, vital experience (Erfahrung) as a consequence of the development of technology and, more importantly, of the deployment of technological warfare on a planetary scale in the First World War. The essay begins with a 23 Benjamin, ‘The Destructive Character’, SW2, p. 542. 24 Benjamin, ‘Mickey Mouse’, SW2, p. 545 25 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, p. 2. 26 Ibid., p. 3.

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reflection on the capacity of proverbs and tales to pass on experience from generation to generation. Benjamin, however, notes that few people were then able to tell stories and that teachings of older generations were no longer transmittable. For him, communicability is an inherently constitutive part of experience (Erfahrung) and laments that experience’s collective, shared, and communicable nature has been reduced in capitalist modernity to multiple subjective experiences (Erlebnisse).27 Benjamin declares that experience has fallen in value and points at the atrocious events of the First World War as a definitive turning point in this decline. Soldiers had come back from the battlefield silent, ‘poorer in communicable experience’.28 Experience had been disrupted not only in the battlefield—where technological and positional warfare had already contravened strategic experience—but also in the everyday, physical experience of civilians, whose long, vital experience (Erfahrung), acquired through the years and handed down from older generations, had no value anymore. Benjamin argues that humanity should be honest enough to admit bankruptcy and to acknowledge that such a stage of human experience is ‘a new kind of barbarism’.29 He takes advantage of the destructive character of this age of poverty to make his argument: Once it is realized that culture and human experience are now part of a new kind of barbarism, we can introduce ‘a new, positive concept of barbarism’.30 According to Maria Boletsi, this poverty should not be understood as lack, but rather as excess: ‘an excess of ideas and styles and an oppressive overload of culture in which people are swamped.’31 Against the wealth of the tradition of humanism and the ‘oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people’ (Benjamin mentions the revival of astrology, chiromancy, vegetarianism, scholasticism, and spiritualism), he proposes, through Brecht, an impoverishment of thought, in order to meet the impoverished reality of everyday life.32 Benjamin argues that this poverty of experience forces the barbarian to make a new start, to begin with a little, and to build up further. Culture, once impoverished, can finally break with tradition and clear away all the traces of bourgeois conventions. 27 For a more detailed discussion of this loss of the communicability of experience and its potential recovery in Benjamin’s ‘new, positive concept of barbarism’, see the articles: Khatib, ‘Barbaric Salvage: Benjamin and the Dialectics of Destruction’, and Van Leeuwen, ‘And Yet It Moves: Marx, Benjamin, Brecht and the Subject of Modernity’. 28 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 731. 29 Ibid., p. 732. 30 Ibid. 31 Boletsi, Barbarism and Its Discontents, p. 118. 32 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 731.

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For this reason, Benjamin champions the constructive principle of authors and artists such as the playwright Brecht, the science-fiction writer Paul Scheerbart, the painter Paul Klee, and the architect Adolf Loos, given they make a determined use of poverty, obeying the laws of their interior and not of bourgeois conventions. Reflecting on the names that Scheerbart gives to his characters (Lesabéndio, Labu, Peka, Manesi, given after the first sounds they pronounce), and the new names in Russia after the October Revolution (October, Pyatiletka, Aviakhim), Benjamin makes one of the political statements of this new, positive concept of barbarism, which was missing in his previous essay ‘The Destructive Character’: ‘No technical renovation of language, but its mobilization in the service of struggle or work—at any rate, of changing reality instead of describing it.’33 When Benjamin argues that the Soviet names or Scheerbart’s ‘stellar Esperanto’, as he calls it in ‘Karl Kraus’, disrupt organic language, he does not mean that language evolves naturally.34 He rather emphasizes that language is itself cultural, constructed arbitrarily. This denaturalized, inorganic, and barbaric language must be mobilized, along with other artistic forms, in the creation of a new culture. At the end of the essay, Benjamin introduces Mickey Mouse in this selected group of positive barbarians precisely because he is radically detached from tradition, for he has been created synthetically. Maria Boletsi has noted that, in ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin uses the neologism Barbarentum instead of the more common German word Barbarei, which he actually uses in ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ (1937) and ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). In the former text, Benjamin uses the term Barbarei to criticize the way in which history—especially cultural history—is generally presented positively, hiding the negative side of cultural heritage. Benjamin claims that there is always a dark side in the lineage of both art and science, which a historical materialist should never overlook: The products of art and science owe their existence not merely to the effort of great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or another, to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.35

On the one hand, this quotation does nothing more than introduce a basic tenet of historical materialism, that human creations are always conditioned 33 Ibid., p. 733. 34 Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, SW2, p. 456. 35 Benjamin, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’, SW3, p. 267.

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by the historical context in which they are produced, whether economic, social, or political. On the other, however, it also claims that the development of culture, an area in which Benjamin includes both art and science, has always been founded on exploitation. For that reason, the development of culture must be understood not only positively, but also negatively: as a document of barbarism. Benjamin repeats the same idea in a more famous passage from the seventh thesis from ‘On the Concept of History’: There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.36

Here, Benjamin introduces the inextricability of barbarism and culture (Kultur). He argues that the way in which culture is transmitted and handed down cannot be separated from the destructive side of history and, therefore, also has to be thought of in terms of its dialectical opposite. Benjamin is interested in stressing the false dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. For him, bourgeois civilization is inherently barbarian. In ‘Experience and Poverty’, however, Benjamin chooses the new term Barbarentum to separate and free the concept from its traditional meaning. According to Boletsi, this neologism stands as a word ‘invested with the potential to disrupt the workings of “Barbarei” in language and in the social and political world’.37 With this new concept, therefore, Benjamin does not pose barbarism as a mere opposition to civilization, a simple antagonistic position to bourgeois culture and Western civilization, but as a third term that disrupts this binary opposition and renders it useless.

Barbarians, Unmenschen, Post-Humans Upon this new conception of barbarism, Benjamin grounds his programmatic critique of humanism. Benjamin selects this particular group of ‘positive barbarians’, because they reject the inherited image of man from the Renaissance, basing their creations instead on ‘the naked man of 36 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, SW4, p. 392. 37 Boletsi, Barbarism and Its Discontents, p. 126.

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the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present’.38 In other words, instead of taking the stable, completed subject of Renaissance man as a model, Benjamin begins with the impoverished human deprived of experience, characteristic of late modernity. This departing point is common to more recent critiques of humanism, notably post-humanism, which rejects ‘the Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian community of reasonable beings, or the subject as citizen, right-holder, property-owner’.39 This model of the human subject was based on a white, European male, therefore inherently exclusive— particularly of other life forms, such as animals and plants, considered inferior to humans and under their control. 40 Benjamin’s post-humanism goes one step further to accuse anthropomorphism of reducing existence to the confined parameters of the individual subject. In his 1931 note, for example, Benjamin celebrates the fact that the characters around Mickey Mouse have cast aside all human resemblance. This non-resemblance, says Benjamin, disrupts the hierarchy of the animal kingdom, which supposedly culminates in mankind. Benjamin criticizes the traditional understanding of the human as being on the top of an evolutionary pyramid to justify their dominance over nature. In ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin highlights this same point with regard to Scheerbart’s creatures and hails the fact that the characters of Lesabéndio reject the principle of humanism.41 These creatures are models of an alternative existence, outside the parameters of traditional humanism. For example, the inhabitants of the asteroid Pallas have no gender and the decision to increase or reduce the Pallasian species is entirely in their hands, for all they have to do is ‘to crack open the nuts found in the star’s lead veins, and a new Pallasian would spring out of every nut’. 42 When they are born, they are named after the first sounds they babble. In the first hours after their birth, they are able to understand and to speak the Pallasian language, and, in a few days, they grow to the size of mature Pallasians. Newborn Pallasians have lived previously in other worlds 38 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 733. 39 Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 1. 40 Nayar, Posthumanism, pp. 3–4; italics in the original. 41 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 733. In his text on Disney, Eisenstein detects a flight from humanness into animal features and argues that it happened in political and philosophical periods in which there was a factual lack of humanness. As an expression of revolt, in these depictions, says Eisenstein, man always stands at the centre: ‘But man brought back, as it were, to those pre-stages that were traced out by […] Darwin.’ Man does not appear as the master over animals, but is intrinsically confused with and interwoven in an animal nature (Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, p. 10). 42 Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, p. 48.

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and, for that reason, the first thing that they do in Pallas is to write down the stories recounted by the new creatures, since everything they can tell is incomparable with the experiences told by preceding Pallasians. They die when they grow dry and transparent. At that point, they can ask to be incorporated into a healthy Pallasian. The living Pallasian absorbs the dying one through their pores. Scheerbart’s Pallasians represent, in this way, a shared and collective existence that is not reduced to the limiting life of the individual. Benjamin also remarks that, unlike Jules Verne’s characters, in which ordinary French or English gentlemen travel around the planet and the cosmos, ‘Scheerbart is interested in inquiring how our telescopes, our airplanes, our rockets can transform human beings as they have been up to now into completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures’. 43 Indeed, Pallasians are able to transform their eyes into microscopes, to develop fountain pens out of their fingers, to incorporate magnifying lenses into their own photographic apparatuses, to contort themselves into radio receivers. In short, Scheerbart’s creatures surpass the traditional conception of the human as they incorporate technology into their own existence. Carlo Salzani has argued that Mickey Mouse should not only be understood as a positive barbarian, but also as an Unmensch (a monster, an inhuman), the third figure that Benjamin introduces in his essay on Karl Kraus, described as ‘the messenger of a more real humanism’. 44 Salzani claims that the hybrid and inhuman figure of Mickey Mouse dismisses and destroys the eternal values of the false universalism of bourgeois humanism. 45 This connection can, in fact, be traced back to the 1931 note on Mickey Mouse, in which Benjamin argues: ‘In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.’46 This is indeed a turn of phrase from his essay on Karl Kraus, in which Benjamin argues that mankind has run out of tears but not of laughter and suggests that mankind can only survive through satire. In the satirist, says Benjamin, ‘civilization prepares to survive’. 47 It is nevertheless civilization that may survive, although only if it takes the figure of the satirist. At the end of ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin returns to the same formulation and argues that, in the creation of the positive barbarians, ‘mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need 43 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 733. 44 Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, SW2, p. 456. 45 Salzani, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 13–14. 46 Benjamin, ‘Mickey Mouse’, SW2, p. 545. The original reads: ‘In diesen Filmen bereitet sich die Menschheit darauf vor, die Zivilisation zu überleben’ (Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 144). 47 Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, SW2, p. 448. In the original: ‘[In ihm] bereitet sie sich vor, die Zivilisation, wenn es sein muß, zu überleben’ (Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 355).

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be’. 48 For Benjamin, therefore, the only way to survive the contemporary crisis of civilization is to follow the principles of these creatures, these modern barbarians and Unmenschen who have abandoned experience, anthropomorphism, and Kultur. This, however, is not all. Benjamin implies in ‘Karl Kraus’ that, in order to survive, humankind will also need to merge with technology, unlike the average European, who ‘has not succeeded in uniting his life with technology, because he has clung to the ideology of creative existence’. 49 Benjamin associates this ‘creative existence’ with a dilettante obsessed with their own creation. By contrast, Benjamin argues, a more real humanism will prove itself only through destruction. Benjamin detects in the anarchistic, destructive frenzy of the early Mickey Mouse the potential to radicalize the experience of capitalism and its technologization of all aspects of everyday life to the point of exceeding the model of the human constructed and defended by liberal humanism. Only in this way, and not by means of the myth of creativity, will humanity create through technology a new model of the (post)human. Uwe Steiner has argued that both the Unmensch and the barbarian are devised in opposition to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. According to him, the image of a new humanity that Benjamin outlines through the positive barbarian contrasts sharply with the heroic vision of the superhuman. In the aphorism 900 in The Will to Power (1901), Nietzsche speaks of ‘another type of barbarian’, who ‘comes from the heights: a species of conquering and ruling natures, in search of material to mold’.50 This barbarian is embodied in Prometheus. The image of the positive barbarian is diametrically opposed to this. Benjamin’s barbarian is antiheroic. Words such as conquering or mastering are not part of the vocabulary. Benjamin called for the adoption of a technology that would produce an interplay between humanity and nature, never a relationship of domination over each other. The Unmensch and the barbarian, who unite their lives with technology, adopt precisely this type of ‘second technology’. ‘For the perspective of technology’, writes Steiner, ‘Benjamin’s positive barbarism is conceived as antiheroic.’51 Furthermore, Steiner claims that his disconcerting definition of politics in ‘World and Time’ (c.1919–1920), as ‘the fulfillment of an unimproved [ungesteigerten] humanity’,52 can only be understood as ‘a turn of phrase in opposition to 48 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 735. In German: ‘bereitet die Menschheit sich darauf vor, die Kultur, wenn es sein muß, zu überleben’ (Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 219). 49 Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, SW2, p. 456. 50 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 479. 51 Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought, p. 127. 52 Benjamin, ‘World and Time’, SW1, p. 226.

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Nietzsche’.53 In a fragment from the same time, ‘Capitalism as Religion’ (1921), Benjamin reads the conception of the superhuman as a ‘breaking open of the heavens by an intensified [gesteigerte] humanity’.54 The superhuman is ‘the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment’.55 Benjamin defines capitalism in this same excerpt as ‘a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction’.56 His new, more real humanity in the guise of the positive barbarian and the Unmensch is, therefore, distanced from both capitalism and its fulfillment in the Übermensch. Steiner argues that ‘Benjamin’s politics are not concerned with Nietzsche’s human being, an enhanced hybrid’, but rather with ‘the decline of the traditional human being and his rebirth in an as yet unknown form of humanity’.57 For this reason, Benjamin is especially interested in Scheerbart’s creatures and Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is useful for the collective audience of these films to understand the possibilities of technology over the organic human body through humour, if humanity separates once and for all from the bourgeois conception of humanism. In this way, the body of Mickey Mouse, which, according to Benjamin, has incorporated technology into its own nature, should be appropriated by the collective, by way of a mimetic interpenetration of image- and body-space. Mickey Mouse was especially appropriate in the imagining of new forms of existence given that they presented a completely new world, a tabula rasa in which the values of tradition had been invalidated. In the 1931 note, Benjamin argues that the cartoons participate in the same fresh world as fairy tales. This comparison was, in fact, very common in contemporary reviews of Disney. The magazine Lichtbild-Bühne, for example, published an article called ‘Das Märchen lebt’ (‘The Fable Lives’) on 18 February 1930, only a few weeks after the first Mickey Mouse film had been released in Germany. The article names these films as modern fables, adapted to our times, and therefore different from those of our grandparents.58 In the note, Benjamin argues that, in both Mickey Mouse and fairy tales, the most vital events are evoked in an unsymbolic and non-atmospheric way. In ‘Erfahrungsarmut’, Benjamin repeats the same idea and suggests that the only way to tell a tale nowadays is in fairy-tale films (Filmmärchen).59 53 Steiner, ‘The True Politician’, p. 62. 54 Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ SW1, p. 289. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Steiner, ‘The True Politician’, pp. 76–77. 58 Salzani, ‘Introduzione’, p. 6. 59 Benjamin, ‘Erfahrungsarmut’, Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 962.

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Benjamin is, in this way, repeating the popular trope that Disney represents the modern fables or fairy tales of the present day. He even reads the films in connection to a tale by the Grimm brothers: ‘All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.’60 ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) clarifies what Benjamin means with this sentence: The figure of the young man who leaves home ‘shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through’.61 According to Benjamin, fairy tales show us that nature prefers to align with man and not with myth. The magic of these tales is displayed then for the purpose of freeing humanity. Benjamin illustrates this point with the image of the animals that go to the aid of the child, resembling a number of Disney films, starting from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand et al., 1937), in which the animals of the forest warn the dwarves to rush off to chase the wicked witch and save Snow White. Benjamin understands that nature is on the side of humanity. It is only nature understood in mythical terms that is a threatening force for mankind. Horkheimer and Adorno also detected that humankind was sinking into a new kind of barbarism.62 For them, the programme of the Enlightenment was aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty by disenchanting the world and dissolving myth.63 Enlightenment logic originated in the course of liberating humanity from a threatening nature, but this process eventually led to humanity’s domination of nature. Technology, argued Horkheimer and Adorno, was conceived in the Enlightenment precisely to serve this purpose of dominating nature. For them, the human mind was first employed to learn from nature, but, given that the only thing that humans learnt from nature was how to dominate it, they ended up separating from it, and objectifying not only nature, but also themselves. The rationality of civilization, in order to exercise domination over nonhuman nature and over other humans, denies that human beings are themselves nature. For Horkheimer and Adorno, this very denial of nature in humanity ‘is the germ cell of a proliferating mythic irrationality’.64 With this denial, the goal of the control of nature is distorted and means are enthroned as ends in themselves. Eventually, the domination of humans over themselves, in which the individual grounds its selfhood, entails ‘the destruction of 60 61 62 63 64

Benjamin, ‘Mickey Mouse’, SW2, p. 545. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, SW3, p. 157. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xi. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 54.

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the subject in whose service it is undertaken’.65 Horkheimer and Adorno compare this process with sacrifice. For them, the ‘history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice. In other words: the history of renunciation’.66 This self-destruction of the Enlightenment is, for them, also the self-destruction of civilization and, hence, a reversion to barbarism. Their argument is, therefore, the same as Benjamin’s: the development of technology under capitalism is leading to a new stage of barbarism. Their response is, however, very different. Adorno and Horkheimer do not want to abandon the principles of the Enlightenment, given that ‘social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought’.67 Their objective is rather to reconsider the Enlightenment. According to them, the Enlightenment needs to come to terms with its destructive power in order to be faithful to its own principles.68 Benjamin, sensitive to the destructiveness of progress, instead calls for a radicalization of the impoverishment that capitalism-led progress has created, ‘without giving up on technology’s utopian space’.69 Only in the form of the new barbarians, of those impoverished post-human creatures who have incorporated technology into their bodies, does Benjamin think that humankind can survive the present crisis of civilization.

Collective Dream Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Benjamin sought to dissect the myths of the Enlightenment. In opposition to them, however, he thought that the energy provided by these mythic powers could be rechannelled and deployed in a project of social and human transformation. Benjamin envisaged this double-edged project with regard to Mickey Mouse, who was conceived as a ‘dream image’ for the collective. When, in The Arcades Project, Benjamin analysed the appearance of ‘dream images’ in the creation of mass culture, he posited that there was always a layer of dreams that both sustained and exceeded the historical order of production. Miriam Hansen argues that, for Benjamin, ‘the phantasmagorias of modernity were by definition ambiguous, promising a classless society while perpetuating the very opposite’.70 As ‘dream images’, phantasmagorias could be transformed 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., p. 55. 67 Ibid., p. xii. 68 Ibid., p. xv; italics in the original. 69 Khatib, ‘Barbaric Salvage: Benjamin and the Dialectics of Destruction’, p. 150. 70 Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, pp. 191–192.

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and incorporated into energetic strategies for resistance. Marx used the term ‘phantasmagoria’ in the very core of his discussion of the fetishism of commodities in the first volume of Capital (1867). According to Marx, the mysteriousness of the commodity form consists of the fact that ‘the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’, reflecting the relation of the workers to their labour as a social relation between objects.71 The commodity form and the value relation of commodities have no connection with the physical nature of the commodity or the social relations that arise out of them. For this reason, Marx says that ‘the definite social relation between men themselves’ assumes here ‘the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things’.72 Benjamin was also indebted to Adorno for this concept. In The Arcades Project, he quotes Adorno’s definition of phantasmagoria in ‘Fragmente über Wagner’ (1939): as a consumer item in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being. It becomes a magical object, insofar as the labor stored up in it comes to seem supernatural and sacred at the very moment when it can no longer be recognized as labor.73

After this definition, Adorno adds a note on the dream nature of phantasmagorias: ‘The phantasmagoria tends towards dream not merely as the deluded wish-fulfilment of would-be buyers, but chiefly to conceal the labour that has gone into making it.’74 Phantasmagoria is thus the application of the concept of commodity fetishism to the sphere of consumption and cultural reception. Margaret Cohen suggests that, in The Arcades Project, ‘Benjamin extends Marx’s statement on the phantasmagorical powers of the commodity to cover the entire domain of Parisian cultural products’.75 In this sense, those aspects turned to the side of dreams in phantasmagorias could be redeemed and used as a source of energy to empower the collective. 71 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, I, p. 165. 72 Ibid. I have slightly modified the translation. The original sentence reads: ‘Es ist nur das bestimmte gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier für sie die phantasmagorische Form eines Verhältnisses von Dingen annimmt’ (Das Kapital, I, p. 86). 73 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [X13a], pp. 669–670. ‘Fragmente über Wagner’ (1939) was firstly published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, and then reworked and expanded in Adorno’s book In Search of Wagner (1952). 74 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 91–92. 75 Cohen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria’, p. 88.

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In Benjamin’s project to rechannel the energy deployed by phantasmagorias, such as Mickey Mouse, there was a utopian will that could unite the utopias of first and second nature. For Benjamin, the utopias of second nature were those concerning technology and society; whereas those of first nature were based on issues such as life and death, focussing primarily on the human body. Benjamin acknowledges that the problems of second nature were always closer to realization than those of first nature. Indeed, Benjamin claimed that in, the Soviet Union, some of the utopian demands of second nature had been partly realized. Nevertheless, those utopian concerns related to first nature had been gradually put aside. Benjamin notes that both the Marquis de Sade and Fourier envisioned utopias of first nature as a realization of hedonistic life. For that reason, Benjamin argues that Fourier’s work is the first historical effort towards the liberation of the individual through passion and instinct, a demand that Benjamin thought required resolution.76 In the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin claims that there is a twofold utopian will in revolutions, given revolutions not only set their sights on goals within their reach, but also on utopian goals. Benjamin illustrates this idea with the image of a child who, in the process of learning how to grasp a ball, stretches out its hand for the moon: Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. For in revolutions, it is not only the second technology which asserts its claims vis-à-vis society. Because this technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action [Spielraum], immeasurably expanded. […] For the more the collective makes the second technology its own, the more keenly individuals belonging to the collective feel how little they have received of what was due them under the dominion of the first technology. […] No sooner has the second technology secured its initial revolutionary gains than vital questions affecting the individual—questions of love and death which had been buried by the first technology—once again press for solutions.77 76 In The Arcades Project, Benjamin places cruelty in Sade at the opposite extreme to the idyllic world of Fourier. As opposites, though, they could come together, because the Sadist may find in the Fourierist a partner who longs for the punishment and humiliations inflicted by him (The Arcades Project, convolute [W11, 2], pp. 638–639). 77 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n124.

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Benjamin’s political and utopian project was that the collective would adopt second technology to establish a playful relation between social and natural forces. This adoption would be integrated into the collective’s own body through a series of collective innervations. In Benjamin’s anthropologicalmaterialist conception of revolutions, the collective has to transform and adapt the new technologies into the new social body that emerges out of such revolts, to create a collective physis. Film, as one of second nature’s forms of play, could accelerate this adaptation of technology to the collective body. Benjamin thought that, in the realm of cinema, a surplus of energy was produced and could be discharged in the audience. The collective could thereby appropriate second nature as its own first nature in technology and, from the surplus of energy derived from this collective enterprise, impose revolutionary demands on both technology and first, organic nature. For Benjamin, this stream of energy in revolutions was spontaneous and unmediated by theory. In the 1935 exposé of ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Benjamin writes: If it is the misfortune of the workers’ rebellions of old that no theory of revolution directs their course, it is also this absence of theory that, from another perspective, makes possible their spontaneous energy and the enthusiasm with which they set about establishing a new society.78

In this fragment, it is the spontaneity and absence of theory that, as with proletarian children’s theatre, can unleash all the energies of the imagination. The signals from the utopian dream is the receptive innervation, transferred into a creative innervation in the revolution. This is one of the places in Benjamin’s oeuvre in which revolutionary spontaneity comes most clearly to the fore. Immediateness and spontaneity are, in fact, recurrent themes in Benjamin’s understanding of revolutionary practice.79 A similar conception appears in his texts on surrealism and film spectatorship. In film, a revolutionary empowerment—albeit on a smaller scale—takes 78 Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, SW3, p. 43. 79 In ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), for example, Benjamin hails the immediateness of ‘divine violence’. In that case, to be immediate means that such violence is not used as a means to an end. Divine violence is law-destroying, expiatory, striking, lethal, and yet bloodless. Like ‘mythical violence’, it is not a means to an end, but an expression. By contrast, ‘divine violence’ breaks with law; it is not law-making like ‘mythical violence’. Benjamin suggests that ‘divine violence’ can be manifested in revolutionary violence. He implies, however, that such violence would appear immediately, not only because it is not a means to an end, but also because there is no revolutionary theory that supports it (‘Critique of Violence’, SW1, pp. 236–252).

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place as a rehearsal for revolutions. Adorno was not incorrect to notice a lack of theoretical mediation in these themes.80 Indeed, a critique of such immediateness and of the rush of energy through the collective is opportune, since Benjamin often falls into an enthusiastic embrace of spontaneous rebellions, as in the passage quoted above. This spontaneity may certainly bring along a current of energy, rechannelled through the collective, but such energy can also result, as Benjamin recognizes elsewhere, in self-destructive actions. The audience’s immediately—and unmediated by theory, as Adorno recognized—collective plugging into the energy transmitted by Mickey Mouse films is one of the most controversial points in Benjamin’s theory. Eventually, he became aware of the problems of this argument and wrote a footnote in the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay to address the ambiguity of Mickey Mouse and his deployment of energy. In ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin uses a language of dream similar to the one employed in The Arcades Project, and conceives Mickey Mouse as a ‘dream image’: Tiredness is followed by sleep, and then it is not uncommon for a dream to make up for the sadness and discouragement of the day—a dream that shows us in its realized form the simple but magnificent existence for which the energy is lacking in reality. The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary man.81

Benjamin understands cinema reception as a dream and Mickey Mouse as a supplier of energy through the audience in a process of collective innervation. For him, the adaptation of technology to the collective body would come through an innervation, a rush of energy. In ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), Benjamin uses the image of an electric discharge to talk about the revolutionary, empowering quality of art over a collective body. In cinema, a similar interpenetration between image- and body-space takes place and, in this case, it is Mickey Mouse who functions as the supplier of energy to the collective. In ‘Erfahrungsarmut’, Benjamin argues that these films may be incomprehensible to an individual, but not to an entire audience, since Mickey Mouse governs the whole public 80 For similar reasons, he was suspicious of Benjamin’s idea of the ‘collective’ and his ‘immediate concept of function’. Adorno accuses Brecht of having influenced Benjamin in this regard, although Benjamin started to use these concepts—at least ‘collective’—before his friendship with Brecht (letter from Adorno to Benjamin, c.2–4 August 1935, ‘Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”’, SW3, p. 57). 81 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, pp. 734–735.

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rhythmically.82 Benjamin is referring to the synchronization not only of image and sound—a completely novel phenomenon at the time, known precisely as ‘Mickey-Mousing’—but also a synchronization of that audiovisual image with the audience and, with it, among the individuals of the audience. In the first version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin uses the term ‘regrouping of apperceptions’ to describe reception in distraction. Thus, he writes that, in cinema, ‘where the collective seeks distraction, the tactically [taktisch] dominant element that rules over the regrouping of apperception is by no means lacking’.83 There is a tactile and tactical reception of the cinematographic image from the audience. The regrouping of the energy coming from the screen better renders the idea of an empowering collective reception in cinema than the ‘concentration of reactions into a mass’, used in the second and third versions.84 Benjamin also explains this idea in the section devoted to the optical unconscious in the (first and second versions of the) ‘Work of Art’ essay. In the first two versions, he develops the idea of cinema as a dream and the appropriation of individual perceptions by a collective perception: The ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus, that those who are awake have a world in common while each sleeper has a world of his own, has been invalidated by film—and less by depicting the dream world itself than by creating figures of collective dream, such as the globe-encircling Mickey Mouse.85

Unlike dreams, the realm of film makes it possible to adapt and gather a single perception of a character on the screen into the collective body of the audience. Benjamin was, at that time, concerned with developing a theory of collective dreams in The Arcades Project. He sought to create a method for analysing the dialectical turning point from a sleeping to a wakeful state at the moment of awakening, between the ‘dream images’ and phantasmagorias of the nineteenth century and their interpretation. In a convolute of The Arcades Project, in which Benjamin reflects on the psychic and corporeal states that psychoanalysis studies, he declares: ‘This thoroughly fluctuating situation of a consciousness each time manifoldly divided between waking and sleeping has to be transferred from the individual to the collective.’86 82 Benjamin, ‘Erfahrungsarmut’, Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 962. 83 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (first version), p. 34. 84 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 116; ‘Work of Art’ (third version), SW4, p. 264. 85 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, p. 118. 86 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [Gº, 27], p. 844.

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Through the idea of a collective dream, Benjamin identifies in the moment of awakening and interpretation the preservation of the collective dream images that dissolve the spell of its phantasmagoria. Film in general and Mickey Mouse in particular are part of these phantasmagorias of capitalism. The energies that may empower the collective to imagine a better nature, in the tradition of Fourier, should be rescued and incorporated into the collective body of the audience, while the deployment of such energies should be used for the collective transformation of humanity. Benjamin’s theory of awakening, as the dialectical point between the present and what has been (das Gewesene), aimed to dispel the myth that sustained the social order as it was. This was particularly urgent since, according to Benjamin, ‘[t]hat things are “status quo” is the catastrophe’.87 At the same time, through this theory, Benjamin intended to rescue the unrealized dreams from the past. He was interested in Mickey Mouse both because the figure represented not only big film capital, but because Benjamin thought that, through his methodology of dream, he could rescue the utopian images displayed by these cartoons from their instrumental use in the service of capitalism. The utopian desire, which Mickey Mouse might awaken in the collective audience, is understood in terms of a surplus of energy, the energy that contemporary humanity lacked in reality.

Union with Technology The section about Mickey Mouse in ‘Experience and Poverty’ continues with a description of the relation that is performed in the films between nature and technology: [Mickey Mouse’s] life is full of miracles—miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology, but make fun of them. For the most extraordinary thing about them is that they all appear, quite without any machinery, to have been improvised out of the body of Mickey Mouse, out of his supporters and prosecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture, as well as from trees, clouds, and the sea. Nature and technology, primitiveness and comfort, have completely merged.88 87 Ibid., convolute [N9a, 1], p. 473. 88 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 735. When Benjamin talks about furniture, he may be talking about pianos—doubtless Mickey’s favourite object—which take life and, as happens in Jazz Fool (dir. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1929), take revenge on Mickey, who has

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First of all, Benjamin understands that the relation of Mickey Mouse to technology is both playful and ironic—unlike the earnest relation to technology impressed on the Soviet people. Mickey Mouse hyperbolized the promise of technology in a similar way to Grandville and, at the same time, initiated a regime of play and dance. Technology appears hidden, as if it had already been adapted and embodied by the characters, which can fly like aeroplanes (Pluto with his ears in The Moose Hunt [dir. Burt Gillett, 1931]) or, at least, drop like parachutes (Minnie with the aid of her pants in Plane Crazy [dir. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1928]). In this playful and utopian way, Mickey and the other creatures improvise technologically led actions with their own bodies. In other words, the promises of technology, as could be imagined in a world of sheer fantasy, are transferred to their own bodies and gestures through a process of creative innervation. Miriam Hansen has argued that Mickey Mouse characters do not engage with technology as an external force, in terms of the mechanization of their own bodies, but rather ‘they hyperbolize the historical imbrications of nature and technology through humor and parody’.89 For Benjamin, this fusion between nature and technology can be found in Scheerbart’s creatures, too, through which one may explore ‘how our telescopes, our airplanes, our rockets can transform human beings as they have been up to now into completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures’.90 Benjamin points to what creatures will resemble once they have merged with technology, as Unmenschen do, in contrast to the ‘average European’. Through the incorporation of technology, these characters discard all human resemblance to improve their own nature, Benjamin’s epitome of utopia.91 Benjamin argues that, through Mickey Mouse, nature and technology have merged; the first nature of human/animal organic bodies and the second nature in which technology is inscribed have finally fused. The living and nonliving characters have embodied both the utopian and the been playing frantically and brutally; the piano, eventually, bites him with a mouth and teeth made out of its keys. Out of the branch of a tree, on the other hand, Mickey Mouse is able to make a saxophone, that is, to improvise a technological instrument directly from nature, and play it in Jungle Rhythm (dir. Walt Disney, 1929). Finally, the sea also seems to have adopted another nature in films such as Wild Waves (dir. Burt Gillett, 1929) and The Castaway (dir. Wilfred Jackson, 1931), in which the waves change their form according to what Eisenstein coined ‘plasmaticness’, acquiring completely new poly-formic capabilities. 89 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 174. 90 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 733. 91 Here, I follow Esther Leslie’s definition of (Benjamin’s) utopia as ‘an improved nature—and an improved relationship to nature, such as imagined by Fourier—and approved by Marx’ (Hollywood Flatlands, p. 104).

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rational features of technology, hence, the dialectic between the mechanical rhythm and the playful regime that they follow. This synthesis takes place between a first nature untouched by humanity (forest or jungle and animals) and the promises of a technology, which, as Fourier conceived, should serve humanity by providing greater comfort.92 Benjamin continues in the essay: And to people who have grown weary of the endless complications of everyday living and to whom the purpose of existence seems to have been reduced to the most distant vanishing point on an endless horizon, it must come as a tremendous relief to find a way of life in which everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way, in which a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon.93

The relief that the masses feel when they go to the cinema after the workday sounds as a safety valve providing momentary relief from the tensions of everyday life. Such relief, however, should be understood in relation to the therapeutic function of laughter, which Benjamin presents in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. This relief, therefore, preempts the outbreak of psychoses among the masses and helps to innervate, in a salutary fashion, second technology into the body of the audience. In this way, the collective body of the audience can adapt the energy that the picture discharges and which is lacking in their lives, hence, Benjamin’s call regarding surrealism: ‘to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution’.94 The innervation supplied by these Disney films helps shape a collective body, which, in turn, actualizes the dreams of the better nature promised to humanity by technology. As Benjamin prefigures in the fragment on Heraclitus, the merging of (human) nature and technology takes place on a collective rather than an individual basis. The interpenetration of technology and nature is appropriated and embodied by the collective body that Benjamin had prefigured in ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’ (c.1922–1923). It could be argued that, from this interpenetration of second nature into the first nature of a collective body, a third, ideal conception of nature emerges. The idea of a ‘third nature’, conceived by Lukács in ‘Reification 92 Although the milieu of the farm and the barnyard, which are central in these cartoons, are all man-made constructions. 93 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 735. 94 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, SW2, p. 215.

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and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (1923), represents the sublation (Aufhebung) of the problems of a reified existence, in which ‘nature’ refers to: authentic humanity, the true essence of man liberated from the false, mechanising forms of society: man as a perfected whole who has inwardly overcome, or is in the process of overcoming, the dichotomies of theory and practice, reason and the senses, form and content; man whose tendency to create his own forms does not imply an abstract rationalism which ignores concrete content; man for whom freedom and necessity are identical.95

However, in this excerpt, Benjamin at no point presents the possibility of an Aufhebung. He instead proposes a back-and-forth movement in which collective innervation never means a total sublation of the problems of reification. This innervation would not solve the subject/object problem, the reification of the human body, and the shrivelling of experience all at once. For this reason, at the end of ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin asks the reader to step back and maintain a critical distance from the passage on Mickey Mouse. Benjamin then goes on to analyse the impoverishment of the world after the First World War, with the economic crisis and approaching war. According to Benjamin, most people had started anew in a state of experiential and material poverty. These people should rely on those who have founded the cause of the absolutely new, those artists who have adopted a new, positive concept of barbarism. He writes: In its buildings, pictures, and stories, mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need be. And the main thing is that it does so with a laugh. This laughter may occasionally sound barbaric. Well and good. Let us hope that from time to time the individual will give a little humanity to the masses, who one day will repay him with compound interest.96

This section recalls some moments in the essay on Karl Kraus and the note on Mickey Mouse. Laughter is the instrument through which people, in the guise of barbarians, are ready to outlive a culture founded on the tradition of bourgeois humanism. The collective nature of this laughter is also important for the transformation demanded of humanity. In a paralipomenon to the 95 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 136–137. 96 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 735.

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‘Karl Kraus’ essay, Benjamin states that humanity ‘must be abandoned on the level of individual existence so that it can come forth at the level of collective existence’.97 In fact, Benjamin’s engagement with Kraus, whom he might have met through Gustav Glück, was precisely based on his appeal to surpass the individualism of bourgeois humanism.98 This idea would lead to Benjamin’s utopian, anthropological-materialist project of the consummation of the individual Leib in the collective. The project, as Matthew Charles argues, is also devised as an inversion of Nietzsche’s superhuman: ‘the figure of the Nietzschean Übermensch is countered with the technologically collectivized and abject posthumanism of the Unmensch: the “monstrous” or “inhuman”, as an inverted Nietzschean pragmatism.’99 The collective laughter that can be heard in cinemas is, in this sense, barbaric. Horkheimer and Adorno also recognized this, arguing that the laughing audience in the cinemas plays out ‘a parody of humanity’.100 They read, however, the harmony of this collective laughter as a caricature of solidarity, which ultimately pursues a conciliatory function. For Benjamin, by contrast, this act of barbarism opens up the chance to step into a new kind of (post) humanism. The therapeutic and physiological function of this collective laughter was precisely to produce a salutary innervation of technology after the release of dangerous, masochistic energies out of the collective body of the audience. This barbarian laughter might facilitate the promised union with technology, breaking with bourgeois notions of humanism, based primarily on individual subjectivity.

Mickey Mouse and the Commodity Form The text ‘Mickey Mouse’ stresses a political potential in the representation of human alienation and property relations in the cartoon. Though it is not present in ‘Experience and Poverty’, the theme appears again in the ‘Work of Art’ essay in relation to the performance of the actor. As I develop in Chapter 3, Benjamin thought that the audience could take advantage of the performance of the actor in the form of a test in which the actor’s self-alienation is critically witnessed by the spectators. Benjamin identified a 97 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 1102; quoted in Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought, p. 102. 98 See Charles, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Inhumanities’, p. 336. 99 Ibid., p. 337. 100 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 141.

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similar characteristic in the figure of Mickey Mouse. In the first point of the note ‘Mickey Mouse’, he analyses the cartoons through the representation of property relations. Benjamin writes that ‘here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen’.101 Disney’s representation of corporeal dismemberment leads to the estrangement that someone feels when robbed of their own body. According to Esther Leslie, these cartoons ‘make clear that even our bodies do not belong to us’, and, as such, Benjamin conceives them as ‘object lessons in the actuality of alienation’.102 Miriam Hansen qualifies that bodily fragmentation was actually rare in Mickey Mouse and claims that it was far more present in other figures of animation such as Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.103 Against this observation, it is possible to observe a fragmentation of the body in the early Mickey Mouse. For example, in Steamboat Willie (dir. Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney, 1928), the first distributed film featuring Mickey Mouse, the captain of the boat, Pete, grabs Mickey by the waist and turns his body into a long sausage. Mickey then has to put his mutilated body back together with his own hands. In The Barn Dance, Mickey dances clumsily with Minnie and steps on her feet, making her legs longer. In order to recover the usual form of her legs, Minnie ties a knot in her leg and cuts the remaining part with scissors. For Benjamin, these cartoons manifest the alienation experienced in the age of the machine. The members of the audience, confronted with this representation, are able to recognize their own life. For this reason, Benjamin suggests, these films are popular. In the same note, Benjamin adds: ‘The route taken by Mickey Mouse is more like that of a file in an office than it is like that of a marathon runner.’104 Mickey is here embodied in a reified object such as a file, which follows the rhythms of work. This movement is not linear, but discontinuous, as well as mechanized, and deprived of experience. Such a regime, however, is both repeated and disrupted by a logic of play. For this reason, Hansen argues that ‘the frantic movements of the animated creature bare the irrational flipside of the regime of rationalization and trace the contours of a logic of play that resists that regime’.105 Along with this fragmentation and reconstruction of their bodies, the characters of Mickey Mouse transform their bodies to reach some specific use: they 101 Benjamin, ‘Mickey Mouse’, SW2, p. 545. 102 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 83. 103 Hansen, ‘Of Mice and Ducks’, p. 45; and Cinema and Experience, pp. 176–177. 104 Benjamin, ‘Mickey Mouse’, SW2, p. 545. 105 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 170.

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propel themselves with their tails, blow up their bodies as if they were balloons, or make music with their own bodies. Eisenstein understood these metamorphoses as ‘a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form’.106 In ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin understands these practical metamorphoses as having incorporated the functions of technology into their bodies. In this sense, these cartoons teach the audience how to behave as objects in a society based on the commodity form. However, Benjamin suggests that Mickey Mouse cartoons perform a relation between living beings and technology aided by humour, mocking the wonders and promises that technology has bestowed upon humanity. Such promises have been made in the context of the use of technology by capitalism and therefore do not aim at a liberated humanity, but at the exploitation of nature and man for the profit of the owners of that technology. Hence, Benjamin detected in these cartoons both a critique of the reduced scope of the uses of technology by capital and a utopian will to improve human nature. Benjamin identified a similar concern with J. J. Grandville, the nineteenthcentury French caricaturist who is frequently referenced in The Arcades Project. Benjamin perceived in both Grandville and Disney a graphic representation of the expressions that the commodity form took through culture. Both representations rendered the commodity’s existence so evident that they were able to unmask the reified tendencies of capitalism and, at the same time, express the dream side of mass culture, which appeared liberated from its exchange value in the representation of impossible situations. In his text on Disney, Eisenstein attempted to draw a genealogy of analogue representations in the past.107 An obvious analogy was with the fabulists. Eisenstein cites Hippolyte Taine, who argues that fabulists are, at the same time, painters of animals and of human beings: ‘The mixture of human nature, far from concealing animal nature, gives it relief.’108 In the text, Eisenstein recalls Grandville, ‘where human nature is absolutely indissolubly interwoven with an image of animals’.109 Grandville illustrated 106 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, p. 21. 107 Eisenstein writes: ‘We are consciously limiting ourselves to three complete “analogies” in theme and form to Disney: Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Andersen’s Tales, La Fontaine’s Fables. An analogy of the “resurrection” of the natural, the animal (not in the sense of “beast”, but in the sense of “das Animalische”) as antitheses: La Fontaine to the seventeenth century (H. Taine), Andersen to the eighteenth (Brandes), Alice to the nineteenth, Disney to the twentieth’ (Ibid., n94). 108 Ibid., p. 39. 109 Ibid., p. 36.

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the metamorphoses described by fabulists such as La Fontaine (in the seventeenth century) and Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (in the eighteenth), in which characters such as the ant and the grasshopper, the wolf and the lamb were anthropomorphized. But Grandville also created his own fables, for example, in the collection Les Métamorphoses du jour (1829). In it, animals are depicted reproducing the habits, morals, and fashions of different social groups in Grandville’s contemporary France. The same could be said of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (1840–1842), in which Grandville focusses more specifically on social types, embodied in the different animals of the fauna. For Eisenstein, the recurring historical tendency towards the humanization of animals in cultural production was an expression of the ‘lack of humaneness in systems of social government or philosophy’.110 Eisenstein considers Disney’s films to be an expression of—and a protest against—the mechanization of all aspects of life in America, and the trends of mathematical abstraction and metaphysics, which had become mainstream in philosophy. In this sense, the characters of fables and of Mickey Mouse films are not only plastic metaphors that stress essential human features, but they also depict the regression of humans into animals.111 Benjamin saw a similar technique at work in Grandville’s designs. For him, Grandville’s images were a symptomatic expression of the economic base.112 Those expressions were depicted in a sublimated and dreamlike fashion, carrying the anxieties and desires of the collective towards material 110 Ibid., p. 33. 111 Eisenstein writes that ‘the personification of animals in this moralizing, fabulist manner, has as a sensuously nourishing subtext its own offshoot of totemistic belief in the “factual regression” into an animal’ (Ibid., p. 52). 112 Benjamin explored the relationship between base and superstructure in a number of texts. For example, in the first thesis of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin argues that the changes in the base proceed far quicker than those in the superstructure. As such, transformations in the base manifest themselves a posteriori in the superstructure. In this way, the dialectics of the conditions of production make themselves evident in art. This also applies to technology and to the way in which the adoption of technology in production eventually manifests itself in the superstructure. The word that Benjamin uses here to talk about the relation between base and superstructure is ‘manifestation’ (‘Work of Art’ [second version], SW3, p. 101). This description of the base-superstructure metaphor is similar to the one he presents in The Arcades Project. There, Benjamin writes that, at first sight, it seemed that Marx wanted to establish a causal relationship between base and superstructure, although his own insights, in fact, went beyond that connection. For Benjamin, the relation between base and superstructure cannot be one of reflection, but one of expression. He argues that economic conditions are expressed in the superstructure. Benjamin compares this relation with the image of a sleeper with an overfull stomach, whose dream’s content is not the reflection of the dinner but, from a causal point of

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reality. Benjamin understood Grandville as a commentator of society through fashion and advertisement. He claimed that the most interesting aspect of fashion for philosophy was the way it ‘precede[s] the perceptible reality by years’.113 Whoever understands that ‘semaphore’, says Benjamin, will be able to foresee the new currents in arts and in society. For him, here lies the charm of fashion, but also the difficulty of making such charm fruitful in philosophy. Benjamin understood fashion in the realm of modern phantasmagorias and as part of a collective dreamworld. Using the same vocabulary associated with innervation, he argues that ‘the collective dream energy of a society’ took refuge ‘with redoubled vehemence in the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion’.114 To illustrate this idea, Benjamin describes a work by Grandville, ‘La Lune peinte par elle-même’, from the book Un autre monde (1844). In this work, the moon, in the form of a woman, reposes on two fashionable velvet cushions instead of on clouds and looks at her reflection in the waters of a river. There is another design from Un autre monde, which mocks the capricious power of fashion at the time, ‘La Mode’. A woman, who represents Fashion, handles a wheel in which there are different hats, each over a different year. A group of bourgeois men are waiting for the random decision of Fashion to determine what style of hat must be worn that year. Benjamin understood that, in the realm of art and poetry, fashion could at once be preserved and overcome. The caricatures of Grandville offered Benjamin the possibility to carry out this enterprise: to unveil the commodity form that social relations were taking in the nineteenth century through fashion and, at the same time, to rescue the utopian gesture of imagined dreamworlds from its total commodification. For Benjamin, Grandville revealed fashion’s real nature by taking it to an extreme and extending its authority not only to objects of everyday use, but also to the cosmos. Thus, in ‘Pérégrinations d’une comète’, Grandville draws the tail of a comet as if it were the tail of a woman’s long night dress. It is in this way that, according to Benjamin, Grandville reveals the fetishism of commodities, but also the mysteriousness of the commodity, which, according to Marx, abounds in ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’.115 For Marx, there is nothing mysterious in the use-value of a commodity. However, as soon as an object emerges as a commodity and is placed in relation to view, is conditioned by it. For Benjamin, then, the base conditions the superstructure, but does not determine it (The Arcades Project, convolute [K2, 5], p. 392). 113 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [B1a, 1], pp. 63–64. 114 Ibid., convolute [B1a, 2], p. 64. 115 Marx, Capital, I, p. 163. Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project: ‘The subtleties of Grandville aptly express what Marx calls the “theological niceties” of the commodity’ (convolute [G5a, 2], p. 182).

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other commodities, he argues, it evolves grotesque ideas. In Grandville’s designs, it could be argued that the capricious subtleties by which objects accommodate to fashion offer grotesque evidence of the reification of society through the commodity form. These designs resonate with Marx’s illustration of those ‘metaphysical subtleties’ and ‘theological niceties’. In the section on the fetishism of commodities in the first volume of Capital, Marx writes that the grotesque ideas that evolve out of the physical qualities of a commodity—he gives the example of a table—are ‘far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will’.116 This resonates with the Mickey Mouse films, in which pieces of furniture start dancing to the rhythm set by Mickey. Benjamin, therefore, could see in Mickey Mouse, in a similar fashion to Grandville, an apt expression of the fetishism of commodities. Marx had observed that, in the production of commodities, relations between people did not appear as social relations, but as ‘material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things’.117 In other words, ‘the commodity-producing society humanizes objects, it objectifies humans’.118 Grandville, and then Mickey Mouse, provided the graphic representations of this strange metamorphosis caused by the commodity form. Eisenstein argued that the literalization of metaphors was one of the main sources of humour in Disney’s work. Walt Disney’s characters are thus the embodiment of a metaphor that is expressed graphically in a character or an action—for example, an animal accepts becoming an object or, conversely, an object is anthropomorphized. In these literalized metaphors, Benjamin might have found an accurate illustration of reification. While social relations were objectified, the relations between things were animated. Benjamin was also interested in the secularization of history into nature in Grandville’s designs; Benjamin analysed this process of secularization years before in his book on the Baroque Trauerspiel. For Benjamin, Grandville’s designs, by dressing up nature in the fashions of his contemporary society, enabled history to be derived from nature, understood as cosmos, the world of animals, and plants. In designs such as ‘La Lune peinte par elle-même’, Benjamin perceived that history had been ‘secularized and drawn into a natural context as relentlessly as it was three hundred years earlier with allegory’.119 Benjamin sought to revive the concepts of ‘allegory’ 116 Marx, Capital, I, p. 164. 117 Ibid., pp. 165–166. 118 Asendorf, Batteries of Life, p. 30. Asendorf makes this statement in an analysis of Grandville in relation to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form. 119 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [G16, 3], pp. 200–201.

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and of ‘natural history’ in the nineteenth century through Grandville. Esther Leslie argues that, by turning nature into the latest fashion, ‘Grandville’s caprices turn historical events into a facet of nature, and so parody the history of humanity’.120 As Eisenstein also identified in Disney, Grandville’s designs represented a movement: The anthropomorphized animals stressed and parodied human features alongside a regression towards animal and natural laws. In Grandville, the regression towards natural laws performed by fashion is especially emphasized in a collection devoted to the world of plants. Les Fleurs animées (1847) includes women who, in a process of metamorphosis with flowers, end up dressing in vegetable outf its à la mode. Here, the idea of civilization as a progressive course of development is mocked by showing the transience of nature as the latest fashion, which will not last more than a season. According to Christoph Asendorf, in ‘Grandville’s metamorphosis, the commodity is made demiurgically into nature, with nature (life) being delivered up to second nature (the commodity) in the process’.121 By turning the commodity into a facet of nature and nature into a facet of history, as per second nature, Grandville unveils the fetishism of a world governed by the commodity form. Marx already thought of commodities in an anthropomorphized form, imagining not only a table dancing, but also commodities speaking.122 Grandville took these relations further in a parabolic and grotesque way. Walt Disney further developed the representation of the objectified relation between people and the socialized relation between objects. He animated on the screen those same relations and appealed to the spectators with the same rhythms that moved animals and objects.

Mickey Mouse’s Ambiguity In response to the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Adorno’s letter from 18 March 1936 rejects the conception of cinema audiences’ collective laughter as neither salutary nor revolutionary. For Adorno, this laughter reeked of bourgeois sadism. Benjamin and Horkheimer also discussed the first version of the essay and took up some of the first observations by Adorno. The result was 120 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 99. 121 Asendorf, Batteries of Life, p. 36. 122 ‘If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it’ (Marx, Capital, I, pp. 166–167).

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not a reformulation of the text, but a number of footnotes which deepened its political and philosophical enquiry. One of these footnotes deals directly with the ambivalence of Mickey Mouse. Benjamin recognizes the double meaning of the figure, who is both comical and horrifying. The most dangerous threat of this ambivalence is that Mickey Mouse’s films accept ‘bestiality and violence as inevitable concomitants of existence’.123 Benjamin locates this sinister trait within the tradition of fairy tales: ‘This renews an old tradition which is far from reassuring—the tradition inaugurated by the dancing hooligans to be found in depictions of medieval pogroms, of whom the “riff-raff” in Grimm’s fairy tale of that title are a pale, indistinct rear-guard.’124 This commentary draws a link between this old tradition in fairy tales, Mickey Mouse, and the pogroms against Jews which took place in Germany at that time. Benjamin certainly feared that film could train audiences in brutal behaviour. This violence and brutality might, however, become vicious, with any critical laughter turning into sadistic laughter. If this happened, these films could help to deploy the destructive energies performed by Mickey and his friends in the service of fascism. According to Esther Leslie, Mickey Mouse’s critique of the values of bourgeois humanism ‘could turn out to be misanthropy and an accommodation to punishing those defined as outsiders, freaks’.125 This is the same argument expressed by Horkheimer and Adorno in ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944–1947), in which they return to the point outlined in the letter to Benjamin. In that essay, they claim that the protagonist of recent cartoons has become ‘the worthless object of general violence’.126 Their judgement of earlier cartoons is now more positive, for they at least opposed rationalism and, in this sense, resembled slapstick comedy. Horkheimer and Adorno shift attention from Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck, who, they argue, acts as a target for violence. The audience, they claim, mirrors him and learns how to receive their own punishment. This reflects the sacrifice of the individual in civilization. As such, these films are, for Horkheimer and Adorno, lessons for the renunciation of control of one’s individualism. However true this argument is, it does not invalidate Benjamin’s point. For him, the problem is that violence among people, animals, and objects is conceived of as both natural and joyful. Benjamin recognizes that Mickey Mouse’s effect upon the audience is ambiguous and that the energy that these films transmit to 123 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n130. 124 Ibid. 125 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 117. 126 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 138.

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the collective could be deployed not only humanely, but also in the form of misanthropic violence. This violence could then be inflicted, as Horkheimer and Adorno contend, on the outsiders. In the above-mentioned footnote on Mickey Mouse, Benjamin makes the following remark with regard to colour film: ‘Their gloomy and sinister fire-magic, made technically possible by color film, highlights a feature which up to now has been present only covertly, and shows how easily fascism takes over “revolutionary” innovations in this field too.’127 Benjamin could not be referring to the fire in the mirror of Snow White’s stepmother in Disney’s first full-length film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, given it was released one year after he wrote this note. Benjamin might then be referring to Mickey’s Fire Brigade (dir. Ben Sharpsteen, 1935), a Technicolor film, which depicts Mickey, Donald, and Goofy as firemen. Fire appears in colour, with the ability to run with two legs, to play piano, and to attack Donald with an axe. This depiction is not wholly different from previous black-and-white representations of fire in films such as The Fire Fighters (dir. Burt Gillett, 1930) and Mickey’s Steamroller (dir. David Hand, 1934). In these films, fire takes different forms, tickles Mickey’s bottom, and, in the latter, plays with Mickey’s nephews. At the same time that it is playful, however, fire in Mickey’s Fire Brigade is more subjectified, more threatening, and more difficult to combat. It is not easy to say to what extent this depiction is achieved by means of colour and how could fascism take advantage of the use of colour. Benjamin here alludes to fire as mysterious, threatening, and attractive, resonant with a fascist understanding of nature; characteristics that were only possible thanks to colour and to the technical innovations incorporated by the Disney studio by that time.128 Benjamin’s argument is nevertheless underdeveloped, and the connection remains unclear. A closer look at Mickey’s Fire Brigade reveals that Donald—the clown, the outsider—is not the film’s object of violence. Rather, it is Goofy, the henchman, who willingly follows every order issued by Mickey. At this point, the extent to which the characters in these films are reified becomes apparent. Many of the animals in the cartoons act willingly as mere objects for the sake of Mickey’s fun—especially as musical instruments. Minnie remains the only one who responds angrily to Mickey’s use of her body as an instrument. In 127 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’ (second version), SW3, n130. 128 It is worth noting here that Eisenstein saw fire as one of the sources of Disney’s animism and for the pleasure of awakening life in an inert object. For Eisenstein, fire could assume all possible guises and was thus the most capable element for ‘fully conveying the dream of a flowing diversity of forms’ (Eisenstein on Disney, p. 24).

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The Cactus Kid (dir. Walt Disney, 1930), for example, Mickey claps Minnie’s cheeks like a drum and pulls her nose. Minnie, who, until then, had happily watched Mickey’s performance, gets angry and reproaches him. A similar episode occurs in The Shindig (dir. Burt Gillett, 1930). Mickey makes music out of any object he can find (a bucket, a barrel, a paper bag), while Minnie plays the piano. At one point, Mickey decides to play Minnie’s tail as if it were a string and pulls Minnie’s trousers as percussion. Minnie then responds angrily and demands that he stop. In this instance of objectification, Mickey Mouse can be read in connection with Sade, who, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, showed that unfeelingness and thingness were at the core of capitalism. Leslie argues that, by doing the same thing, Mickey ‘portrays, unmasks, and makes available for criticism’.129 If one reads Mickey Mouse in these terms, it could be argued that these cartoons disclose the mythical character of the principles that govern the organization of the body in contemporary society. Nevertheless, however one reads Mickey Mouse, there is always an ambivalence between the reification of the corporeal and the utopian liberation of the body from the fetters of nature. In a similar manner to his project on the Parisian arcades, Benjamin sought to redeem the utopian features of this mass-culture character. He analysed Mickey Mouse to understand the objective expression of a society that directed its desire and anger towards the world of things. He thought that the phantasmagorias of capital produced a dream world that sustained the social order as it was, while, at the same time, these phantasmagorical images turned to dream, and this utopian side could be rescued. Max Weber understood that, with the triumph of abstraction and formal reason as the organizing principles of modern capitalism and the state, there had been a rationalization and a disenchantment of the world. Benjamin, however, thought that, while it was true that there had been a rationalization in form, capitalism had brought about a re-enchantment of the social world and a ‘reactivation of mythic forces’.130 According to Susan Buck-Morss, the goal of Benjamin in The Arcades Project was to develop ‘[a] materialist history that disenchants the new nature in order to free it from the spell of capitalism, and yet reserves all the power of enchantment for the purpose of social transformation’.131 For Benjamin, the historical role of cinema was to disenchant second nature by dissecting it and, at the same time, to innervate in the collective body a revolutionary—utopian, re-enchanting—discharge. 129 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 84. 130 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute [K1a, 8], p. 391. 131 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 275.

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Mickey Mouse provided the collective with an example of technological innervation that could be mimetically incorporated into cinema reception. Indeed, the audience found in Mickey Mouse a barbarian to be mirrored. As with the characters of Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio, the audience in the films of Mickey Mouse would explore the ways in which they could be transformed into ‘new, lovable, and interesting creatures’.132 Furthermore, since Mickey Mouse sets the audience’s rhythmical pace, the collective innervation of the body formed by the audience is easier to produce. It was through this discussion of the position of Mickey Mouse in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, however, that Benjamin realized a number of flaws in his theory. The immediate—and theoretically unmediated—energy supplied by films was not always rechannelled in a positive manner. That energy could also be used to inflict violence on outsiders—admittedly not very different from how Mickey did in his films. The destruction caused by Mickey Mouse could teach audiences to tolerate violence as a normal aspect of civilization, instead of helping humanity to survive civilization and create a better existence. Laughter might have eased the relationship of workers with film technology, but, in most cases, it would only work as a temporal relaxation between shifts, preparing workers to endure their next working day under the exploitation of other machines. In short, the outcome of cinema reception was not always a positive, collective innervation through which spectators communally incorporated the utopian promises of technology. Audiences could also embody the most destructive side of technology.

Bibliography Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967). — In the Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981). Garry Apgar, ed., A Mickey Mouse Reader (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2014). Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. by Don Reneau (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1993). Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), II (1977). 132 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, SW2, p. 733.

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— Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), VI (1989). — The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), I (1996). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), II (1999). — The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), III (2002). — Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), IV (2003). — ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (first version), Grey Room, 39 (2010), pp. 11–37. Maria Boletsi, Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1989). Matthew Charles, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Inhumanities: Towards a Pedagogical Anti-Nietzscheanism’, in Pedagogies of Disaster, ed. by Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, Adam Staley Groves, and Nico Jenkins (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum, 2013), pp. 331–341. Margaret Cohen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria’, New German Critique, 48 (1989), pp. 87–107. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. by Jay Leyda, trans. by Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988). Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 179–224. — ‘Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney’, in South Atlantic Quarterly, 92:1 (1993), pp. 27–61.

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— Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 2012). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2000). Sami Khatib, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Figures of De-Figuration: The Barbarian, The Destructive Character, and the Monster’, in Benjamin’s Figures: Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities, ed. by Madeleine Kasten, Rico Sneller, and Gerard Visser (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2018), pp. 71–92. — ‘Barbaric Salvage: Benjamin and the Dialectics of Destruction’, parallax, 24:2 (2018), pp. 135–158. Anne van Leeuwen, ‘And Yet It Moves: Marx, Benjamin, Brecht and the Subject of Modernity’, parallax, 24:2 (2018), pp. 176–192. Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London/New York: Verso, 2002). Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971). Pierre MacOrlan, ‘Grandville le précurseur’, Art et Métiers graphiques, 44, 15 December 1934, pp. 19–25. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 3 vols. (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), I (1968). — Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976–1981), I (1976). Daniel Mourenza, ‘On Some Posthuman Motifs in Walter Benjamin: Mickey Mouse, Barbarism and Technological Innervation’, Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 7 (2016), pp. 28–47. Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. by Walter Kaufmann, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Carlo Salzani, ‘Introduzione: Sopravvivere alla civiltà con Mickey Mouse e una risata’, in Walter Benjamin, Mickey Mouse, trans. and ed. by Carlo Salzani (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2014), pp. 5–33. Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, trans., with an intro., by Christina Svendsen (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2012). Uwe Steiner, ‘The True Politician: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Political’, trans. by Colin Sample, New German Critique, 83 (2001), pp. 43–88. — Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought, trans. by Michael Winkler (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). Irving Wohlfarth, ‘No-Man’s-Land: On Walter Benjamin’s “Destructive Character”’, Diacritics, 8:2 (1978), pp. 47–65.



Conclusion: Benjamin’s Belated Aktualität

Many of Walter Benjamin’s writings on film were, in some sense, belated. When, for example, he engaged in the polemics with Oscar A. H. Schmitz about Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925), debate around the film had already raged in Germany for almost a year. When he decided to support Vertov overtly in the 1939 version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, mentioning a film from five years earlier, Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934), Vertov had long ago moved away from the front line of Soviet cinema and been accused of formalism. When Benjamin started to write about Chaplin, his most transgressive period had also passed. Chaplin’s feature films began to incorporate psychology into his characters and the more anarchic gag structure of his first slapstick comedies was left behind in favour of more plot-centred stories. Certainly, at The Circus (1928), Chaplin was still at his peak, but the advent of sound caught him off guard. As if aware of his own usual belatedness, Benjamin decided to write about Mickey Mouse as soon as 1931, at the peak of the mouse’s notoriety in Germany. Nevertheless, the initial enthusiasm of the intellectuals towards Walt Disney—which, in many respects, echoed that for Chaplin in his first years—soon waned. The release of Disney’s first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand, 1937), showed the studio’s move towards more naturalistic cartoons.1 Mickey Mouse soon left his early anarchistic tenor and began to be depicted as an adult. In the film Mickey’s Steamroller (dir. David Hand, 1934), for example, his nephews become the naughty creatures he once was and Mickey has to direct all his energies to look after them. Some authors have argued that Benjamin’s theses on film were directed towards early cinema and, as such, cannot be applied to later films, especially sound film. Miriam Hansen, for example, argues that the aesthetic qualities that Benjamin ascribed to film were characteristic of a preclassical mode. 1

See Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, pp. 121–122.

Mourenza, D., Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462980174_concl

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According to her, Benjamin’s work on film does not refer as much to 1930s cinema, the period in which he wrote most of his writings on the topic, as they do to, what Tom Gunning called, the ‘cinema of attractions’.2 Carolin Duttlinger, on the other hand, argues that Benjamin not only placed silent film as opposite to the traditional artwork and its reception in museums or galleries, but also to sound film. She stresses that the type of storytelling that Benjamin celebrated had always resisted the complete absorption of the audience, whether oral storytelling or Brecht’s epic theatre. Benjamin, she claims, detected in modern, technological forms of entertainment, a similar dynamic and praised silent film because it produced a similar reaction, which involved the possibility of a more politically active response.3 This state of attention was necessary for transferring the energies coming from the screen into a collective innervation that would positively embody technology. Sound film, however, did not allow this type of reception, as Benjamin argues in a letter to Adorno in December 1938: It becomes more and more obvious to me that the launching of the sound film must be viewed as an industrial action designed to break through the revolutionary primacy of the silent film, which fostered reactions that were hard to control and politically dangerous. An analysis of the sound film would provide a critique of contemporary art that would dialectically mediate between your view and mine. 4

Here, Benjamin refers to Adorno’s ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (1938) in connection to his ‘Work of Art’ essay. Benjamin argues that Adorno was articulating the negative moments of mass culture, in contrast to his own work. In his opinion, an analysis of sound film could mediate both positions. However, such an analysis never came to fruition. In this fragment, Benjamin is much more positive towards silent film than he is towards sound film and acknowledges that the object of study of his essay was silent film. Benjamin was aware of the changes that, by 1938, sound had caused in the type of perception that he observed and championed in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. Certainly, this essay, which was first drafted in 1935, had already been written under the supremacy of sound film. The first feature-length sound film to be commercialized, The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crosland), was 2 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 86. 3 Duttlinger, ‘Benjamin’s Literary History of Attention’, p. 282. 4 Letter to Adorno, 9 December 1938 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 591).

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premiered in 1927. By the early 1930s, sound film had become the norm not only in the United States, but also throughout Europe. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin reflects, though briefly, on the arrival of sound and colour film. In the footnote about Disney, Benjamin considers colour film to be an a priori revolutionary technical advance, which had been used for counterrevolutionary purposes by the film industry. In the third, 1939 version, Benjamin adds that sound impressions enter our unconscious in the same way as visual images—therefore implying the existence of an ‘acoustic unconscious’. However, in the above-mentioned letter, Benjamin seems to recognize that his theses reflected, first and foremost, on silent film. If this were the case, the theses of the ‘Work of Art’ would be truly belated. Though the films that he most appreciated, and to which he devoted a more detailed analysis, were mainly silent films, such as Battleship Potemkin and The Circus, not all the films that he praised were silent. In the Mickey Mouse films, for example, sound was one of the most important features, sound being synchronized with the movement of the characters, who danced and moved to the rhythm of the music. Sergei M. Eisenstein, in fact, argued that Disney was the only American director to use sound film properly.5 Sound in Mickey Mouse films utterly differed from the self-enclosed narratives of the classical style. The frantic rhythm of music in these films was part of the shock effects that Benjamin considered to be positive in film in order to train the perception of the audience. Mickey Mouse was, indeed, able to direct the whole audience rhythmically, as Benjamin noted in 1933. The audience was then not passively absorbed into the narrative as in later practices, which used sound to give a clearer illusion of naturalism. Adorno, however, was not as keen as was Benjamin to look at the ‘positive moments’ of mass culture. In the famous letter from 18 March 1936, Adorno disagrees with placing Mickey Mouse in opposition to those films that tried to attain auratic features. For him, these cartoons also participated in the ‘naïve realism’ that both attempted to criticize.6 The use of speech in sound film created a style in which everything should be explained and repeated, undermining the alertness and presence of the body in film spectatorship. The psychological absorption into Hollywood’s ‘naïve realism’ blocked the positive potentials that Benjamin saw at stake in the mimetic relation between screen and audience in silent film. For Benjamin, those reactions were difficult to control, its shocks engendering a rush of energy through the audience that could produce an 5 North, Machine-Age Comedy, p. 56. 6 Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 18 March 1936 (The Complete Correspondence, pp. 130–131).

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empowering innervation in the audience, whilst also recognizing that this same uncontrollable energy could be deployed for self-destructive purposes. The spectators of silent films faced the screen with a bodily presence of mind. However, in certain film practices in which psychological absorption was pursued, the body was not as actively present as was the mind. In this type of film, the spectators might follow the plot and feel empathy with the characters without activating their imagination, blocking an empowering innervation in the collective. Spectators of Hollywood cinema participated in a bombardment of impressions, in a simultaneity of overstimulation and numbness, which, according to Susan Buck-Morss, was characteristic of the new synaesthetic organization of the senses as anaesthetics. In this way, this aesthetic provided a way of obstructing reality by numbing the senses and the sensuous relationship of the subject with the material world. In other words, these films blocked the organism from responding politically. In this way, Buck-Morss suggests that ‘[h]ow a film is constructed, whether it breaks through the numbing shield of consciousness or merely provides a “drill” for the strength of its defences, becomes a matter of central political signif icance’.7 According to Benjamin, the f ilm industry was reducing our capacity to respond to the film with a corporeal presence which could become collective. In a 1939 letter to Max Horkheimer, Benjamin mentions Frank Capra’s film You Can’t Take It with You (1938), a film he had recently seen. Perhaps under the influence of Horkheimer’s negative stance towards mass culture, Benjamin accused the film of being complicit with fascism. He denounced the critique of capital made by this film as benefiting fascism and criticized the conservative story and the infantilism of its characters: The best opium for the Volk today is a certain type of inoffensiveness, that narcotic, in which ‘heart-warming’ and ‘silliness’ are the most important ingredients. This Capra film proves how reactionary the slogan ‘against plutocracy’ can be.8

The film has a typically Capraesque moralistic plot that criticizes the greediness of the powerful magnate Anthony P. Kirby, who is involved in the trade of weapons. His son, and vice president of the company, Tony Kirby, and a stenographer who works for them, Alice Sycamore, are in love, but their 7 Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, p. 18. 8 Letter to Horkheimer, 18 June 1939 (Gesammelte Briefe, VI, pp. 304–305); cited in Leslie, Walter Benjamin, p. 203.

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marriage is in danger for the avarice of the magnate, who wants to buy the house where Alice’s grandfather and his eccentric family live. That family, however, is not interested in money and they do not accept the offer. The film’s critique of capital comes through the slogan ‘not everything in the world is about money’, which is repeated throughout the film. Thanks to this perseverance, the magnate Anthony P. Kirby is eventually convinced not to carry out his project. The reconciliation between the good-hearted, eccentric Vanderhof family and the Kirbies comes through the individual change of heart of the magnate, creating a new equilibrium in the form of the wedding between the two young lovers. This critique of capital, in short, does not question power relations or the involvement of international capitalism in the arms industry. For that reason, Benjamin thought that the film repeated the same critique that fascism made of capitalism. It was not a struggle between capitalism and spirit (or individual psychology); rather, it was a struggle between capitalism and the proletariat. Furthermore, Benjamin might have thought that the infantile behaviour of the characters, which eventually leads the evil magnate to change his mind, would numb any desire, not to say any political action, to change the state of affairs that allows such injustices. Adorno reflects on the same point in his 1963 essay ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ to argue that Hollywood films transform adults into eleven-year-olds.9 For him, the aim of such infantilism, of which Capra’s characters are a faithful reflection, is to make the development of the spectators’ consciousnesses regress in order to make them conform to that which already exists. The naivety and conciliatory humour of this film is certainly conservative. For that reason, the laughter of the audience in this film would not be expected to perform the function that he ascribed to Mickey Mouse’s and Chaplin’s films in his ‘theory of distraction’. In those films, the audience could release, through collective laughter, the dangerous energies developing in the masses and, through this therapeutic catharsis, be able to innervate second technology in a more salutary fashion into their own bodies. This therapeutic, cathartic function enabled by collective laughter was, for Benjamin, a necessary counterpart for the technological innervation of the collective body assembled in cinemas. With a film such as You Can’t Take It with You, it is difficult to argue that such a release of unconscious energies was possible. The collective innervation of second technology into the body of the audience was becoming more and more precarious. In the light of the observations above about the use of sound by the film industry, one could argue that the corporeal presence necessary to produce 9

Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in The Culture Industry, p. 105.

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a cathartic release of energies and a salutary innervation of technology was only possible in early cinema. However, the adaptation of technology into the human body, whether through cinema or other technologies, has become a central theme for media and technology theorists in the ensuing years. Writing in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan developed a similar idea about technologies being adapted to the human body as prostheses. For McLuhan, media are extensions of our human senses and nerves. Using terms very similar to the concept of innervation, he claims that these technological prostheses are collective by nature: ‘our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us.’10 Similarly to Benjamin, McLuhan thought that electronic media were constantly altering our perceptual senses and connecting each other by technological extensions of our nervous system. The technological transformation of the human body has also become a central theme in recent literature around post-humanism. For the last 30 years, post-humanism has argued that the incorporation of technology into the human body is changing the parameters of how human nature should be understood, displacing the traditional conception of what constitutes a human. Benjamin coined the concept of anthropological materialism for a similar reason: in order to explore the historical changes undergone by the human body and the way that these may transform traditional conceptions of humanity. Benjamin’s writings on technology in general and film in particular offer highly relevant theories—and correctives—for contemporary debates on post-humanism. Benjamin’s writings also speak to many contemporary theories that focus on the tactility and proximity of digital images. Through tactile screens and digital interfaces, the image has drawn closer to the human body. In recent years, however, film reception has become experienced more individually, through increasing viewings on personal devices such as laptops, tablets, and even mobile phones. This phenomenon would seem to go against Benjamin’s argument about cinema’s collective audience. Nonetheless, at the same time, it has also become more collective given the rise of social networks, the Internet, and a growing internationalization of consumption. As these technologies are collective per se and link their users—i.e. the audience—in and through those technologies, it can be argued that they also form a collective body. The reception of digital images has also become more tactile and digital media have been mimetically incorporated as prostheses into the human body. As a consequence, the distance between body and image 10 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 20.

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has also been shortened, and the way in which we perceive and experience images has been accordingly transformed. Benjamin’s conception of aisthēsis, as an analysis of sense perception, proves to be particularly pertinent to address these questions. Benjamin’s basic contribution to the study of new technologies, however, should not be based on the premise that digital technologies can be incorporated into the human body, but on whether those technologies respond to the principles of second technology and therefore should be adapted. At this stage, the debates about first and second technology and about the refunctioning of technological art forms become particularly relevant in determining the type of technology that the collective should create and adopt. Consequently, technologies must be considered with regards to whether they embody an instrumental and ultimately self-destructive telos. Here lies the critical impulse which is needed to analyse the aesthetic and social implications of new technologies and the ever-changing nature of film spectatorship. Perhaps for that reason, although belated in his discussions, Benjamin’s writings on film aesthetics still spark our interest.

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Eric Rentschler, ‘Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light’, October, 48 (1989), pp. 46–68. — ‘Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm,’ New German Critique, 51 (1990), pp. 137–161. Gerhard Richter, ‘Face-Off’, Monatshefte, 90:4 (1998), pp. 411–444. — Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). Leni Riefenstahl, The Sieve of Time: The Memoirs of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Quartet, 1992). Aloïs Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. by Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985). — Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. by Jacqueline E. Jung (New York: Zone Books, 2004). Carlo Salzani, ‘Introduzione: Sopravvivere alla civiltà con Mickey Mouse e una risata’, in Walter Benjamin, Mickey Mouse, trans. and ed. by Carlo Salzani (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2014), pp. 5–33. Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, trans., with an intro., by Christina Svendsen (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2012). Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967). Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003). Linda Schulte-Sasse, ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic’, Cultural Critique, 18 (1991), pp. 123–148. Jan Sieber, ‘Technique as a Pure Means. On Walter Benjamin’s Non-instrumentalist Concept of Technique’, Anthropological Materialism (2012), n.p.; available at (accessed 6 September 2019). — ‘Técnica’, en Glosario Walter Benjamin. Conceptos y figuras, ed. by Esther Cohen (México DF: UNAM, 2016), pp. 209–218. Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in Under the Sign of Saturn (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 71–105. Lloyd Spencer, ‘Allegory in the World of the Commodity: The Importance of Central Park’, New German Critique, 34 (1985), pp. 59–77. Uwe Steiner, ‘The True Politician: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Political’, trans. by Colin Sample, New German Critique, 83 (2001), pp. 43–88. — ‘Von Bern nach Muri. Vier unveröffentlichte Briefe Walter Benjamins an Paul Häberlin im Kontext’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 75 (2001), pp. 463–490.

Bibliogr aphy

251

— Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought, trans. by Michael Winkler (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Rainer Stollmann, ‘Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aesthetization of Political Life in National Socialism’, trans. by Ronald L. Smith, New German Critique, 14 (1978), pp. 41–60. Michael Taussig, ‘Tactility and Distraction’, Cultural Anthropology, 6:2 (1991), pp. 147–153 Simon Taylor, ‘Symbol and Ritual under National Socialism’, The British Journal of Sociology, 32:4 (1981), pp. 504–520. Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Historical Materialism or Political Materialism? An Interpretation of the Theses “On the Concept of History”’, trans. by Barton Byg, Jeremy Gaines, and Doris L. Jones, in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. by Gary Smith (Chicago/London: The Chicago University Press, 1989), pp. 75–209. Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia, with an intro. by George Novack (New York/ London: Pathfinder, 1973). J. O. Urmson, The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1990). Ana Useros, ‘El misterio Chaplin’, in Mundo Escrito: 13 Derivas desde Walter Benjamin, ed. by Juan Barja and César Rendueles (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2013), pp. 73–89. Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. by Annette Michelson, trans. by Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984). Carl Weber, ‘Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition’, in Brecht Sourcebook, ed. by Carol Martin and Henry Bial (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 43–49. Samuel Weber, ‘Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth and Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play’, MLN, 106:3 (1991), pp. 465–500. — Benjamin’s –abilities (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2010). Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. by Georgina Paul, Rachel McNicholl, and Jeremy Gaines (London: Psychology Press, 1996). Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003). Tobias Wilke, ‘Tacti(ca)lity Reclaimed: Benjamin’s Medium, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of the Senses’, Grey Room, 39 (2010), pp. 39–55. Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Christine Shuttleworth (London: Libris, 2009).

252 

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Michael Woal and Linda Kowall Woal, ‘Chaplin and the Comedy of Melodrama’, Journal of Film and Video, 46:3 (1994), pp. 3–15. Irving Wohlfarth, ‘No-Man’s-Land: On Walter Benjamin’s “Destructive Character”’, Diacritics, 8:2 (1978), pp. 47–65. — ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros: A Tentative Reading of “Zum Planetarium”’, in Perception and Experience in Modernity, ed. by Helga Geyer-Ryan (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 65–109. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1994).

Index acoustic unconscious: n81, 237 Adorno, Gretel (née Karplus): 15, n112, 113 Adorno, Theodor W.: 14, 17, 20, 30, n34, 65, 66, 70–72, n127, n130, 131, 143, 163, 179, 182, 185–189, 200, 210–212, 215, 221, 227–230, 236, 237, 239 Aesthetic Theory: 66 ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’: n44, 239 Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer): n143, 179, 185, 210, 221, 228, 229 ‘Fragmente über Wagner’: 212 ‘Idea of Natural History, The’: n65, 66, 70–72, 163 In Search of Wagner: 212 ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’: 236 Prisms: n34, n65, 200 aestheticization of politics: 23, 118, 121, 129, 131, 137, 144–146 aisthēsis: 23, 61, 241 Alberti, Rafael: n156 Alice in Wonderland (dir. Norman McLeod, 1933): 15 allegory: 24, 71, 72, 74, 153, 157–166, n172, 176–178, 187, 200, 226 All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP): 105, 110, 111 American Magazine (periodical): 196 anthropological materialism: 18–20, 22, 27–30, 41, 48, 114, 119, 147, 240 Aristotle: 61 Arnheim, Rudolf: 21, 77, 78, 98 Film as Art: 77, 78, 98 Balázs, Béla: 21, 77–80, 139, n140, 156, 157, n165 barbarism: 14, 24, n179, 197, 198, 202–205, 208, 210, 220, 221 barbarian: 24, 197, 203, 205, 207–209, 221, 231 new, positive concept of barbarism: 14, 24, 197, 198, 202, 204, 208, 211 Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925): see Eisenstein, Sergei M. Baudelaire, Charles: 58, 72, 162, 176–178, 187 Bauhaus: 202 Baumgarten, Alexander: 61 Aesthetica: 61 Metaphysics: 61 Becher, Johannes R.: 112 Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ (dir. Fred Niblo, 1925): 14, 125 Benjamin, Walter: 11–25, 27–53, 55–61, 63–82, 87–115, 117–137, 139–148, 153–191, 195–231, 235–241

Benjamin, Walter, works of: Arcades Project, The: 22, 28–30, 38, 55, n58, n66, n73, n126, 163, n164–165, n174, 180, 181, 183, 198–200, 211–213, 215–217, 223, n224, 225, 226, 230 ‘Author as Producer, The’: 23, 88, 104–111, 114, 135, 167, 168, 181, 182 ‘Capitalism as Religion’: 209 ‘Central Park’: 72, 81, 176, 177 ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’: 13, 21, 154, 156, 181, 188 ‘Chaplin’: 154, 155, n176, 188, 154, 155, 176, 188 ‘Critique of Violence’: 34, n40, 91, n214 ‘Destructive Character, The’: 14, 24, 197, 201, 202, 204 ‘Dream Kitsch’: 47, 82 ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’: 118, 148, 204 ‘Erfahrungsarmut’: 197, 209, 215, 216 ‘Experience and Poverty’: 14, 24, 37, 53, n56, 57, 118, 119, n179, 195, 197, 201–208, 215, 217–221, 223 ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’: 162–164 ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’: 113, 126 ‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’: 142–144 ‘Ibizan Sequence’: n170 ‘Karl Kraus’: 24, 197, 204, 207, 208, 221 ‘Little History of Photography’: 74, 75, 80, 89, 97, n126 ‘Mickey Mouse’: 14, 21, 195, 197, 202, 207, 210, 221, 222 ‘Moscow’: 11 Moscow Diary: 11–13, 89–93, 100, 132, 133 ‘On Blushing in Rage and Shame’: 31 One Way Street: 22, 35–39, 45, 46, 48–50, 53, 57, 75, 122, 147, 148, 183 ‘On Horror’: 31 ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’: 75, 123, 160 ‘On Love and Related Matters’: 31 ‘On Scheerbart’: 40, 41 ‘On Shame’: 31 ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’: 19, 42, 55–58, n64, n126, 180, 190 ‘On the Concept of History’: n160, 163, 164, 199, 204, 205 ‘On the Image of Proust’: 89 ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’: 36 ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’: 12, 87, 93–101, 111, 159 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The: n65, 70, 71, 159–161, 163, 176, 177, 200, 226

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‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’: 22, 32–35, 38, 219 ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’: 65, 214 ‘Perception and Body’: 31, 157 ‘Political Groupings of Russian Writers, The’: 89, 110, 111 ‘Present Social Situation of the French Writer, The’: 28 ‘Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater, The’: 43–45, 175 ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’: 21, 23, 67–69, 73, 76, 87–89, 101–104, 106, 115, 117, 132, 188 ‘Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, The’: 37, n68, 118, 183, 184, 210 ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’: 22, 28, 41, 42, 46–48, 53, 219 ‘Task of the Translator, The’: 160, 161 ‘Theater and Radio’: 67, 182 ‘Theological-Political Fragment’: 33, 34 ‘Theories of German Fascism’: 34, 37, 39, 118–124, 148 ‘What Is the Epic Theater?’: n45, 159, 168 ‘Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The’: 14, 16, 17, n19, 22–24, 32, 36, 37, 39, 47–53, 57–61, 63–69, 73–75, 77–81, n87, 88, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 107, 108, 110, 111, 117, 118, 121, 124–132, 134, 136, 137, 141, 144–148, 154, 162, n164, 165, 170, 171, 173, 178–180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 195, 198, 213, 215, 216, 219, 221, n224, 227–229, 231 ‘World and Time’: 208 Bergfilme: 138–140 Bergson, Henri: 181, 186 Rire, Le: 181, 186 Berl, Emmanuel: n29–30, 181 Berlin: 88, 94, n102, 133, 165 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, dir. Walter Ruttmann, 1927): 69 Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie (periodical): 54 Bloch, Ernst: n40, n68, n112, 113 Spirit of Utopia: n40 Blonde or Brunette (dir. Richard Rosson, 1927): 15 Brecht, Bertolt: 21, 24, 108, 112–114, 157, 159, 162, 165–169, 171–173, 181, 203, n215 Man Equals Man: 167 Reader for City-dwellers: 201 Bringing Up Baby (dir. Howard Hawks, 1938): 15 Buber, Martin: 11 Büchner, Georg: 28, n29 Bukharin, Nikolai: 28

Buñuel, Luis: n156 By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926): see Kuleshov, Lev Cahiers du Cinéma (periodical): 156 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro: 161 Capra, Franz: 238 You Can’t Take It with You (1938): 238, 239 Carr, Harry: 196 Carroll, Lewis: 15, n223 Chaplin, Charlie: 13, 14, 20, 24, 72, 89, 92–95, 101, 103, 115, 142–144, 154–159, 162, 163, 165–167, n170, 171, 173–176, 178, 180, 181, 186–191, 195, 196, 235, 239 Circus, The (1928): 13, 89, 154, 155, 174, 187, 235, 237 Countess from Hong Kong, A (1967): n156 Face on the Barroom Floor, The (1914): 166 Gold Rush, The (1925): 154 Great Dictator, The (1940): 142, 143 Idle Class, The (1921): 143 Kid, The (1921): n142, 154 Modern Times (1936): 95, 188–191 Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate, A (1923): 154, n156 cinefication (kinofikatsiia): 98, 99 cinema of attractions: 236 cinema reform movement: 54 Circus, The (1928): see Chaplin, Charlie civilization: 178, 179, 205, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 227, 228, 231 Cleopatra (dir. Cecil B. Demille, 1934): 4, 125 Cocteau, Jean: 156 Cohn, Alfred: 15 collective body: 16, 18, 19, 22, 29, n32, 33, 35–41, 46–50, 52, 58, 67, 82, 99, 114, 130, 165, 171, 179, 181, 182, 197, 200, 214–217, 219, 221, 230, 239, 240. commodities: 66, 67, 127, 177, 187, 191, 201, 212, 221, 223, 225–227 Dada: 47, 58, 63, 64 Daguerre, Louis: 65 Darwin, Charles: n206 Delluc, Louis: 156 Démar, Claire: 29, 38 Ma Loi d’avenir: 29 Devrient, Paul: 12 Dinner at Eight (dir. George Cukor, 1933): 15 Disney (see also Mickey Mouse): 53, 178, 179, 186, 195, 196, 200, 202, 209, 210, 219, 223, 227, 229, 237 ‘Silly Symphonies’: 196 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand et al., 1937): 210, 229, 235 Disney, Walt: 196, 200, n217–218, 218, 222, 227, 230, 235, 237 distraction, theory of/reception in (Zerstreuung): 45, 53, 59, 64, 178, 182–186, 189, 216, 239 dream images: 198, 211, 215–217, 223, 225

Index

Edison, Thomas Alva: 94 Eisenstein, Sergei M.: 11, 13, 43–45, 69, 88, 89, 91, 93, 97, 98, 111, 132, n143, 156, 157, 191, 195, 202, n206, n218, 223, 224, 226, 227, n229, 235, 237 Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925): 11, 12, n13, 69, 76, 88, 89, 91, 92, 101–103, 106, 110, 115, 118, 132, 133, 136, 235, 237 General Line, The (Staroye i novoye, 1929): 97, 98, 110 October (Oktyabr, 1927): 110 Strike (Stachka, 1925): 110 Eisner, Lotte: 21 Engels, Friedrich: 199 Enlightenment: 210, 211 Erfahrung: 36, 37, 56, 118, 119, 183, n184, 202, 203 Erlebnis: 37, 56, 119, 178, 203 Fronterlebnis: 37, 119 shock experience (Chockerlebnis): 156 Europe: Revue mensuelle (periodical): 156 fairy tales: 197, 209, 210, 228 Fanck, Arnold: 138, 139, n140 Avalanche (Stürme über dem Mont Blanc, 1930): 139 fashion: 200, 201, 224–227 Faure, Elie: 156 Fedortschenko, Sofja: 119 Russe redet: Aufzeichnungen nach dem Stenogramm, Der: 119 Felix the Cat: 222 Felke, Naldo: 55 Film-Kurier (periodical): 89 first nature: 64–68, 71, 76, 101, 115, 123, 144, 165, 213, 214, 218, 219 first technology: 49–52, 63, 65, 66, 100, 110, 136, 142–144, 146, 213, 241 First World War: 23, 36–39, 118, 147, 171, 172, 201–203, 220 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de: 224 Forch, Carl: 54 Fourier, Charles: 28, 29, n37, 198–201, 213, 217, n218, 219 Frankfurter Zeitung (periodical): n170, 201 Frederick the Great (dir. Arzén von Cserépy, 1922–1923): 14, 117, 125, 126 Freud, Sigmund: 19, 42, 43, 56, 81, 82 Beyond the Pleasure Principle: 19, 56 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The: 81 Friedlaender, Salomo: n40 Gábor, Andor: 112 Galsworthy, John: 102 Forsyte Saga, The: 102 Gance, Abel: 14, 125, 128 Napoleon (1927): 14, 128 García Lorca, Federico: n156

255 Gastev, Aleksei: 100 Gaupp, Robert: 54 General Line, The (Staroye i novoye, 1929): see Eisenstein, Sergei M. German Youth Movement: 35 Die Gesellschaft (periodical): 120 Gestus: 24, 155, 157, 165–175, 188–190 Gide, André: 113 Return from the USSR: 113 Glück, Gustav: 14, 195–197, 221 Goebbels, Joseph: 122, 123, 138, 145 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 17, 51, 113, 126 Goll, Yvan: n156 Grandville, J. J. (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard): 198, 200, 201, 218, 223–227 autre monde, Un: 225 Fleurs animées, Les: 227 Métamorphoses du jour, Les: 224 Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux: 224 Gutzkow, Karl: 28, n29 Haas, Willy: 11, 21, 89, n102 Häberlin, Paul: 31, 32 Harbou, Thea von: 136 Hašek, Jaroslav: 170 Good Soldier Švejk, The: 170 Hebel, Johann Peter: 28 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: n38, 61, 62, 65, 71, 199 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art: 61, 62 Philosophy of History, The: n65 Heidegger, Martin: 70, 71, 113 Being and Time: 70 Hepburn, Katharine: 15 Heraclitus: 216, 219 historical materialism: 146, 164, 204 Hitler, Adolf: 129–131, 139–143, 148 Hollywood: 127, 237–239 Horkheimer, Max: 14, 113, 124, n130, n143, 179, 182, 185, 210, 211, 221, 227–230, 238 Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Theodor W. Adorno): n143, 179, 185, 210, 221, 228, 229 humanism: 24, 191, 197, 198, 203, 205–209, 220, 221, 228 Husserl, Edmund: 31 Ihering, Herbert: 21 Ilyinsky, Igor: 11, 13, 92, 93, 159 innervation: 18–20, 22, 24, 36, 41–49, 52, 53, 57, 58, 61, 67, 82, 100, 101, 114, 120, 121, 148, 158, 165, 173, 175, 179, 186, 197, 198, 200, 213–215, 218–221, 225, 231, 236, 238–240 Institut pour l’étude du fascism: 112 Internationale Literatur (periodical): n112, 113 intoxication (Rausch): 23, 37, 120–123, 146, 147 Irrende Seelen (dir. Carl Froelich, 1921): 14

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Jazz Singer, The (dir. Alan Crosland, 1927): 236 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter): 28, n29 Jünger, Ernst: 23, 37, 120–123, 146, 147 Arbeiter, Der: 120 Krieg und Krieger (edited by): 119–121 ‘Total Mobilization’: 120, 121, 146, 147 Kafka, Franz: 24, 157, 162–166, 168–170, 172, 173, 178, 191 Amerika: 169, 172 Kant, Immanuel: 62, n75, n138, 206 Critique of Judgement: 62, n75 Keaton, Buster: 153, 154, n156 College (1927): n156 Keller, Gottfried: 28, n29 Kerzhentsev, Platon: 100 Kienzl, Hermann: 54 Kinematograph, Der (periodical): 76 kitsch: 181 Klages, Ludwig: 35, 36, 122 Klee, Paul: 204 Koko the Clown: 222 Kracauer, Siegfried: 20, 21, 88, 106, 125, 132–134, n136, 139, 140, n148, 156, n184–185, n187 From Caligari to Hitler: 133, 140 ‘Klieg Lights Stay on: The Frankfurt Screening of Potemkin, The’: 88, 106 ‘Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies, The’: n88 ‘Mass Ornament, The’: 133, 140 Kraus, Karl: 24, 195, 197, 204, 207, 208, 220, 221 Kreatur, Die (periodical): 11 Kuleshov, Lev: 13, 91, 93 By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926): n13, 91, 92 Kurella, Alfred: 112, 113 Lācis, Asja: 12, 43, 45, 89–91, 165 La Fontaine, Jean de: n223, 224 Lang, Fritz: 23, 132, 136, n140 Metropolis (1927): 23, 132–137, 142 Nibelungen, Die (1924): 132, 133 laughter: 13, 53, 142, 143, 154, 155, 157, 178–182, 185, 186, 188, 189, 196, 207, 219–221, 227, 228, 231, 239 Laurence, James de: 29 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Lucien Ducasse): 28 Lebensphilosophie: 80 Left Front of the Arts: 109–111, 114 LEF (periodical): 109 Novy LEF (periodical): 109 Lenin, Vladimir (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov): 94, 99, 100, 131, 181, 189 State and Revolution: 131 Lesabéndio: see Scheerbart, Paul Lichtbild-Bühne (periodical): 209 literarische Welt, Die (periodical): 11, 13, 16, 29, 87, 88, 92, n102, 110, 119, 154

London, Jack: 91 ‘Unexpected, The’: 91 Loos, Adolf: 204 Lost Patrol (dir. John Ford, 1934): 15 Lugano: n41 Lukács, György: n38, 65–68, 70, 71, 103, 104, 112, 219, 220 ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’: 66, 219, 220 ‘Tendency or Partisanship’: 103, 104 Theory of the Novel, The: 65–68, 103 Macdonald, Philip: 15 Death in the Desert: 15 MacOrlan, Pierre: 200 Manhatta (Charles Scheeler and Paul Strand, 1922): 69 Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929): see Vertov, Dziga Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: 23, 37, n130, 146, 147 Marx, Karl: n58, n66, 67, n187, 190, 198, 199, 212, n218, n244, 225–227 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: 67, n187, 190, 212, 225–227 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: n58, n66 Marx-Steinschneider, Kitti: 15 McLuhan, Marshall: 46, 240 Melcher, Gustav: 76 Méliès, Georges: 200 Ménestrier, Claude-François: 176 Menjou, Adolphe: 14, 15 Metropolis (1927): see Lang, Fritz Meyerhold, Vsevolod: 43, 93, 94 Mickey Mouse: 14, 18, 20, 24, n29, n42, 53, n179, 191, 195–202, 204, 206–211, 213, 215–218, 220–224, 226–231, 235, 237, 239 Barn Dance, The (dir. Walt Disney, 1929): 196, 222 Cactus Kid, The (dir. Walt Disney, 1930): 230 Castaway, The (dir. Wilfred Jackson, 1931): n218 Fire Fighters, The (dir. Burt Gillett, 1930): 229 Jazz Fool (dir. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1929): n217 Jungle Rhythm (dir. Walt Disney, 1929): n218 Mickey’s Fire Brigade (dir. Ben Sharpsteen, 1935): 229 Mickey’s Steamroller (dir. David Hand, 1934): 229, 235 Moose Hunt, The (dir. Burt Gillett, 1931): 218 Plane Crazy (dir. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1928): 218 Shindig, The (dir. Burt Gillett, 1930): 230

Index

Steamboat Willie (dir. Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney, 1928): 222 Wild Waves (dir. Burt Gillett, 1929): n218 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (dir. Max Reinhardt, 1935): 128 Misère au Borinage (dir. Joris Ivens and Henri Storck, 1933): 14, 111 Miss Mend or The Adventures of the Three Reporters (Miss Mend, dir. Boris Barnet and Fyodor Otsep, 1926): n92 Modern Times (1936): see Chaplin, Charlie Moholy-Nagy, Lázlo: 77 Painting, Photography, Film: 77 montage: 13, 44, 52, 95, 161, 162, 167, 168, 174, 175, 182, 183, n187 Morgenstern, Soma: n112 Moscow: 11, 12, 23, 87, 89–94, 97, 98, 100, 111, 112–114, 133 Mother (Mat, 1926): see Pudovkin, Vsevolod Mussolini, Benito: 143 Napoleon (1927): see Gance, Abel National Socialism: 21, 108, 118, 122, 123, 128–133, 137–145 natural history: n65, 70–73, 200, 201, 227 Neher, Carola: 172 Neumann, Franz: n130, 131 Behemoth: 131 New York World (periodical): 189 Nietzsche, Friedrich: 28, n29, 198, 208, 209, 221 superhuman (Übermensch): 198, 208, 209, 221 Will to Power, The: 208 Notari, Umberto: 11 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg): n139 One-Sixth of the World (Shestaya chast mira, 1926): see Vertov, Dziga optical unconscious: 23, 57, 64, 65, 73–82, 102, 107, 123, n126, 165, n184, 216 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: 222 Panofsky, Erwin: n60 panoramas: 65, n174 Pansky: 12, 91, 92 Paris: 14, 112, 137, n156, n165, n174, 178 Passion of Joan of Arc , The (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928): 14, 98 Peet, Creighton: 196 phantasmagoria: 127, 211–213, 216, 217, 225, 230 Picasso, Pablo: 180, 181 Plekhanov, Georgi: 28, 199 play (Spiel): 17, 21, 43, 50–52, 63, 99, 101, 127, 140, 142–144, 158, 175, 190, 213, 214, 218, 219, 222, 229 Spielraum: 52, 158, 213

257 post-humanism: 20, 197, 205, 206, 211, 221, 240 Protazanov, Yakov: 11, 92 Tailor from Torzhok, The (Zakroyshchik iz Torzhka, 1925): 92 Trial of the Three Million, The (Protsess o tryokh millionakh, 1926): 11, 92 Pudovkin, Vsevolod: 11, 13, 92, 93, 95, 97, 102 Mother (Mat, 1926): 11, 12, 92, 102 Rang, Florens Christian: 35 refunctioning (Umfunktionierung): n60, 105, 108, 114, 124, 172, 241 Reich, Bernhard: 12, 91–93, 132, 133 revolutions: n29, n32–33, n35, 39, 47, 48, 50, 52, n58, 88–91, 94, n100, 101, 104–109, 111, 114, 115, 129, 131, 135, 158, 181, 182, 184, 199, 200, 204, 213–215, 219, 227, 229, 230, 236, 237 Richter, Hans: 21 Riefenstahl, Leni: 23, 134, 137–142, n148 Blue Light, The (Das blaue Licht, 1932): 138, n139, n140 Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935): 134, 137, 139–142, n148 Riegl, Aloïs: 59, 60, 63, 64 Rimbaud, Arthur: 28 Rodchenko, Aleksandr: 94 ruins: 69–72, 177 Sade, Marquis de: 213, 230 Saint-Simon, Henri de: 28 Sander, August: 97 Face of Our Time: 97 Scheerbart, Paul: 39–41, n45, 90, 91, 204, 206, 231 Lesabéndio: 40, 41, n45, 90, 91, 204, 206, 231 Münchhausen und Clarissa: n41 Scheler, Max: 31 Schiller, Friedrich: 17, 51, 62, 63, n138, 140, 158 On the Aesthetic Education of Man: 51, 62, 63 Schklovsky, Viktor: 94 Schmitz, Oscar A. H.: 11, 12, 88, 89, 91, 101–103, 106, 235 Scholem, Gershom: 14, n40, n41, n68, 108, n112, 160, 197 second nature: 22, 38, 64–76, 81, 82, 102, 107, 115, 123, 144, 165, 213, 214, 218, 219, 227, 230 second technology: 22, 49–53, 63, 65, 66, 100, 101, 110, 142, 143, 208, 213, 214, 219, 239, 241 Second World War: 121, 137 semblance (Schein): 17, 50, 51, 62, 63, 72, 126, 127, 140–145, 177 beautiful semblance: 51, 126, 127, 140–145 Shakespeare, William: 156 shock: 19, 24, 44, 54–56, 60, 64, 76, n166, 168, 175, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, n184, 237 shock experience (Chockerlebnis): see Erlebnis

258  silent film: n73, 78, 79, 184, 236–238 Sinclair, Lewis: 102 Babbit: 102 slapstick: 53, 76, 94, 153, n156, 157–159, 178, 179, 186, 188, 228, 235 Social Celebrity, A (dir. Malcolm St. Clair, 1926): 15 Sontag, Susan: n137, 139, n140 sound film: n81, 235–238 Soupault, Philippe: 13, 154, 156, n176, 181 Stage Door (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1937): 15 Stalin, Joseph: 111–113 Steffin, Margarete: 112, n113 Stepanova, Varvara: 94 Strom, Der (periodical): 54 surrealism: 13, 18, 28, n29, 41, 46–49, 52, 58, 82, 156, 183, 200, 214, 219 Svendborg, Denmark: n15, 113, 163 Tailor from Torzhok, The (Zakroyshchik iz Torzhka, 1925): see Protazanov, Yakov Taine, Hippolyte: 223 taktisch: 59, 60, 63, 64, 68, n184, 216, 240 Taylorism: 95, 99, 100, 134, 190 Tendenzkunst: 103, 106, 128 Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934): see Vertov, Dziga Toussenel, Alphonse: 29 Tretyakov, Sergei: 43

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthe tics of Film

Trotsky, Leon: 100, n112 Tucholsky, Kurt: 21 UFA (Universum-Film Aktiengesell­ schaft): 12, 23, 115, 117, 127, 132, 133 Unmensch: 24, n29, 197, 207–209, 218, 221 Vecherniaia Moskva (periodical): 90 Verne, Jules: 207 Vertov, Dziga: 12–14, 69, 76, 77, 93, 95–97, 109, 111, 114, 235 Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929): 69, 111 One-Sixth of the World (Shestaya chast mira, 1926): 12, 93, 95–97 Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934): 14, 111, 235 Wasserman, Jakob: 102 Laudin and His Family: 102 Weber, Max: 230 Weill, Kurt: 14, 195 Werfel, Franz: 128 Wickhoff, Franz: 59 Wolfram, Aurel: 54 Wort, Das (periodical): 111, n112 Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (periodical): n189, n212