Throughout the 1930s, the Frankfurt School was engaged with working out why socialist revolution had not happened and why Hitler had come to power. Nonetheless, some of its most virtuosic work concerned culture – that new front in the neo-Marxist struggle. In 1936, for instance, the Institute’s journal published two essays to do with modern art. One of them, by Walter Benjamin, has become a classic of twentieth-century writing, endlessly reproduced, mimeographed, downloaded, cited, cut and pasted until its aura suffuses nearly every text written on the theory of art since it appeared. The other, by Theodor Adorno, has become intellectual kryptonite, disdained even by many of his most ardent admirers for its ostensible racism and for its diagnosis of the art form under discussion as both a kind of premature ejaculation and a more or less sadomasochistic repressive desublimation that was emblematic of the perverse weakness and passivity into which it cast its practitioners and audiences.
There are other differences. Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is almost crazily hopeful for the revolutionary potential of new mass art forms, particularly cinema.1 Adorno’s ‘On Jazz’, written under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler, is a vicious savaging of a new kind of music whose social impact he loathed and which he took to be representative of the disaster of commodified art under capitalism.2
But both essays are neo-Marxist critiques of mass culture, and so antidotes to the snobbish conservative jeremiads that prevailed then as now. Both men were cultural iconoclasts by upbringing and temperament, but you’d be hard pushed to find anything of the snobbery of Proust, the contempt for mass cultural production of Huxley or the disdain for popular entertainment of D. H. Lawrence in either of these essays. Neither sees in the new art forms they are writing about cause for a Spenglerian lament over the decline of the west. Neither seeks to damn the barbarisms of the present by juxtaposition with the glories of the past.
Both essays were written in the limbo of exile – Benjamin was in Paris, Adorno in his third year at Oxford, and the future of both seemed bound up with leaving Europe. As a result, fascism haunted both texts. Adorno’s critique of jazz was deranged by hearing military marches in its syncopated rhythms; while for Benjamin, fascism was an urgent threat to which communism responds by politicising art. Benjamin seems to realise that the luxury of despair over the diminishing of human experience by mass culture is improper at a time when fascism needs to be attacked. The despair he expressed in his essay ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ about how human experience was diminished by our ‘bungled reception of technology’ was set aside in favour of a hopeful reflection on how new technological art forms, in particular cinema, might revolutionise human sensibilities, and perhaps even make them more resistant to fascism. His dreams for cinema were not quite crushed by the onrushing Hollywood machine. He worried about how the cult of the movie star involved the phoney spell of personality and commodity fetishism, but almost parenthetically: most of the rest of his most famous essay ran excitingly against the grain of the proverbial negativity of the Frankfurt School. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ opens with the idea that, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a tipping point in art’s relationship with technology:
Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact on the public; it had also captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of these repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on its traditional form.
Where Huxley, in words that Benjamin quoted in a footnote, had taken this change as facilitating ‘vulgarity’ and the ‘output of trash’, Benjamin imagined its liberating potential. Not that he was naive enough to argue that the output of trash had not also increased thanks to technological change. For him, the new standard of technical reproduction was what alcohol was for fellow dialectician Homer Simpson – the cause of, and remedy for, the impoverishment of human experience.
It’s easy to imagine what this impoverishment looks like: D. H. Lawrence imagined it when he wrote about humans
sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces3
What’s much harder to do is what Benjamin did in this essay: to imagine how the changes in mechanical reproduction might liberate us. Benjamin hoped that photography and cinema would blast open the cultural tradition, liquidate the power that the ruling class has exerted over the masses by means of the aura of authenticity, authority and permanence of works of art. His writings around this time were marked by violent images – as if the coming war had begun for him already.
‘The ideologies of the rulers are by their nature more changeable than the ideas of the oppressed’, wrote Benjamin in The Arcades Project around the time of this essay. ‘For not only must they, like the ideas of the latter, adapt each time to the situation of social conflict, but they must glorify that situation as fundamentally harmonious.’4 The ideologies of the rulers, then, are like what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would four decades later call memes – units for carrying ideas and practices that mutate and respond to adaptive pressures. Benjamin’s hope was to disrupt that viral spread of the ruling class’s memes. Works of art weren’t just beautiful autonomous expressions of human creative impulses, but rather had an instrumental role in maintaining the ruling class’s power. By being situated in a cultural tradition that conferred status on them and the tradition, works of art became fetishes and served the same mystifying purposes as the commodities Marx wrote about: they airbrushed the bloody social conflict and glorified a disharmonious situation as fundamentally harmonious. Benjamin wanted to reduce that whole tradition to rubble.
Robespierre had reappropriated ancient Rome for the French Revolution and thereby had, as Benjamin put it in his ‘Theses’, blasted open the continuum of history. Benjamin wanted to blast open the continuum of cultural heritage, so that the oppressed could see the circumstances in which they were living, reveal the barbarism that underlay the beauty, shake the masses from their slumbers. What seems normal must be exposed as perverse and oppressive. Benjamin thought he could see how this could be done. ‘Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’, he wrote. The force of this gnomic remark may be difficult to grasp, since we don’t immediately think of the work of art as being involved in ritual. But that’s precisely what Benjamin thought had been the function of the work of art. ‘As we know’, he wrote, ‘the earliest artworks originated in the service of rituals.’ No doubt, but the leap from that to this next sentence was at least counterintuitive. ‘In other words: the unique value of the “authentic” work of art always has its basis in ritual.’ But that is far from obvious. Perhaps we might see ritual in the ancient Greeks’ veneration of a statue of Venus, but not in a trip to the Louvre to see the Venus de Milo. Benjamin’s point, his biographers argued, is that if a work of art is reproduced mechanically, the viewer or listener doesn’t have to receive it in the space consecrated to its cult, such as a museum, concert hall, or church. But, one might retort, surely sitting in a cinema or listening to a record is as much (or as little) about cultic practices and rituals as experiencing arts that are not reproduced mechanically.
Benjamin’s suggestion – and it’s a suggestion that has to be constructed from the rubble of his thoughts, since the essay is written in a manner parallel to the montage techniques that he admired – is that art’s ritual basis is maintained even when, as it did during the Renaissance, it steps down from the sacred altar and joins the profane cult of beauty. The picture gallery and the concert hall are temples that don’t declare themselves as such. Even in an age when God is dead and beauty secularised (roughly, the era from the Renaissance to the start of the twentieth century in Benjamin’s view), the work of art still has its basis in ritual.
But then something remarkable happens. Photography is born. Around the same time and, Benjamin implied, not coincidentally, socialism is too. The former, for Benjamin, is the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction; the latter the politics that will destroy the ruling class and all its works. Together they will liquidate art’s dependence on ritual. Only one problem: art refuses to be recast in a political role on the world stage of history. Instead, art spends the nineteenth century dressing itself up and pretending to be that which, for Benjamin, it is not: it denies itself any social function. The work of art affects to be intrinsically valuable, not valuable in part because it helps uphold the status quo. Thus, perhaps, the insistence in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that the aesthetic judgement is necessarily disinterested. Hence the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement that called for art for art’s sake. In this aesthetic movement, art was making a last stand, asserting its autonomy and purity when, if Benjamin was right, its destiny was political. Photography, Benjamin argued, separated art from its basis in cult and its autonomy disappeared forever. Instead of art for art’s sake, the twentieth century would see art for politics’ sake.
And when art became political in the age of mechanical reproduction, that involved two things: first revolutionising the sensory apparatuses of the masses so that they could see for the first time how they have become the handmaidens to the powers that be; and destroying the aura of the work of art itself.
The aura is a mystifying phenomenon. Benjamin wrote: ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’, defining it in terms of nature: ‘If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.’ Aura then involved distance; mechanical reproduction, he suggested, involved abolishing that distance. But the distance to which Benjamin referred in his essay need not be physical: rather it’s the psychological distance, or authority, that gives the work of art its aura. That distance may involve a ritualised peek-a-boo with the spectator. ‘Certain sculptures in cathedrals’, noted Benjamin, ‘are invisible to the spectator on ground level.’ Some sculptures of the Madonna are covered nearly all year round. Some statues of gods were available to be seen only to the priests in the inner chamber of Greek and Roman temples.
Thus, in various ways, the aura of the work of art is inapproachable: the riff-raffare often held at a distance in something like awe, admitted on special occasions with timed tickets; meanwhile, the initiates have access all areas, confirming their status and the power of the work of art. Of course, all this is equally true of the class-stratified demographics of today’s rock festivals or opera houses. At the former, the unfortunates risk trench foot in muddy fields, while the elite have backstage passes and helicopters to whisk them from the horrors of the campsite to their boutique hotels. At the latter, the unfortunates either don’t have what it takes to buy tickets or get vertigo in the Gods, while the privileged few recline in the dress circle plush with enviable views of the action on stage and the prospect of liquid treats in the crush bar at the interval. All of which only goes to show how mechanical reproduction didn’t eliminate the cultural heritage of auratic art as Benjamin had hoped. The secular ritual – think Glastonbury, think Bayreuth – survived the liquidation Benjamin yearned for.
The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin thought, abolished this privileged access, and detonated cultural heritage. He saw cultural heritage as the debased glorification of a site of bloody conflict, and that which preened and postured as beautiful wasn’t much to be trusted either. But, you might object, surely reproduction has been commonplace in art and literature for centuries and has repeatedly revolutionised not just art and culture, but human society – albeit not in the ways Benjamin wanted? For example, think of scribes. These men laboriously copied by hand the wisdom of the ages from fragile and decaying manuscripts. For generations they were indispensable in refreshing cultural memory, until in the mid fifteenth century Gutenberg’s invention of movable type not only made their skills obsolete, but facilitated the Protestant Reformation. In 1492, the Abbot of Sponheim wrote a tract called In Defence of Scribes urging that the scribal tradition be maintained because the very act of handcopying sacred texts brought spiritual enlightenment. One problem: the abbot had his book set in movable type so his argument could be spread quickly and cheaply.
Benjamin didn’t deny any of this. He noted that any work of art is in principle reproducible: since time immemorial, pupils would copy masters’ work for practice, and for financial gain. The Greeks knew only two ways of technically reproducing works of art – stamping and founding, so their reproductions were confined to bronzes, terracottas and coins. Only with the woodcut would graphic art become reproducible; then during the Middle Ages etching and engraving were added. But, Benjamin argued, it was only with lithography that the reproduction of graphic art caught up with the Gutenberg revolution in printing. But lithography was soon surpassed by photography which, for Benjamin, was the revolutionary form of technological reproduction par excellence, since it ‘freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into the lens’.
What was the significance of that? In the past the presence of the original was the prerequisite for the concept of authenticity. The manual reproduction of a work of art confirms the authority of the original; by contrast, mechanical reproduction may subvert that authority – indeed, in some circumstances, it may even mean it doesn’t make any sense to speak of an original. ‘From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense’, wrote Benjamin. Is there an original print of Porky’s 3? It’s not impossible, but even if there is, it won’t stand in the same relation to its reproductions as the original of the Mona Lisa stands to any of the billions of reproductions of Da Vinci’s painting. There is no original work of art imperiously conferring legitimacy on copies and withholding it from forgers – the king is dead, long live the democracy of things.
But Benjamin couched this death of distance in odd terms, arguing that the ‘contemporary masses’ desired to bring things ‘ “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction’. But where did this desire come from? Here Benjamin, and it was a charge that Adorno laid at his door more than once during the 1930s, was insufficiently dialectical. More plausibly, we might argue, improvements in reproduction technologies change what it is possible for capitalists to sell to those whom Benjamin calls the ‘masses’. Desires, that is to say, don’t spring from nowhere. They can be constructed. They are, perhaps, even in dialectical relationship with technology. Technology changes not only what humans can do; it changes humans, makes them desire things they didn’t know existed before. Benjamin realised this, writing: ‘One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand that could only be satisfied later.’
Cinema, radio, TV, recorded music, the internet and social media all involve technological innovations that enable capitalists to provide products that change our desires and so change us. Consider the internet. ‘The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies’, the German post-structuralist philosopher and media theorist Friedrich Kittler once argued. ‘After all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.’ Kittler was countering the benign vision of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who took technological innovations to be human prostheses (hence the subtitle to McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man). On the contrary, Kittler argued, ‘media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it.’5
As for Benjamin, he certainly envisaged technology as prosthetic. He noted that a photograph may capture what the eye can’t see. As a result, the original would not be a point of comparison, through which we judge the success of the photo as a reproduction. It would make no sense in such a case to speak of a forgery. Benjamin also argued that technical reproduction can put the copy into situations impossible for the original: ‘The cathedral leaves its locale to be studied in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.’ He was considering, in the case of the former, a photograph; in the case of the latter, a phonograph.
But, if photography and other art forms of the era of mechanical reproduction extend human perceptual powers, Benjamin imagined that these arts have a political purpose, namely to bring the nature of reality into high definition.
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railway stations and our factories appeared to have locked us up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended … The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Many years later, in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock, whose films have the logic of dreams as if they are realisations on celluloid of unconscious impulses, echoed Benjamin’s insights here when he told François Truffaut what cinema was for: it was, he said, to contract time and to extend it.
Just as Freud placed his hand gently on the back of his patients’ heads and pushed them into their dirty linen, acquainting them with the dark forces that underlay their rational selves, so the camera exposes the brutal dissonances of modern life. And just as there is work for the analysand to do, so there is work for the moviegoer too, Benjamin suggested. But the work doesn’t involve long periods of concentration of the kind that was characteristic of standing before a painting in a picture gallery and taken to heroic extremes by the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim, who wrote: ‘I spent long hours in the Church of San Salvatore in Venice, in the Louvre, in the Guggenheim Museum, coaxing a picture into life. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at.’6 Instead, Benjamin called for ‘reception in distraction’. He imagined such reception as a revolutionary form of perception – an incendiary notion, especially for us to read about in hindsight. Today distraction is more vice than virtue. Indeed, it’s why you can’t get anything done. Technological innovation keeps us leaping from one pointless task after the other, replying to emails, updating Facebook status, tweeting, texting, always working at our screens, like victims of a cyberspace Sisyphean curse. This distracted way of living runs counter to the popular theory of the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow.7 But then Benjamin was not a poet hymning work, or a philosopher of happiness. More likely, he would have regarded happiness, flow, absorption and the cult of fulfilling labour as fatuous quests for wholeness, delusions that stop us realising we are in a broken world, knee deep in accumulated rubble, downtrodden and exploited.
Absorption and flow are characteristic of the creation and reception of auratic art. The kind of art Benjamin prized and took to have revolutionary potential was otherwise: it involved disruption and estrangement, bursting open the smooth surface of reality. Instead of meditation on delusive harmonies, it meant being discombobulated by dissonances, jump-cuts, deranging montages. Absent-mindedness was very nearly a virtue for Benjamin. You might say that cinema, for him, was a Brechtian alienation technique with better technology. Film, as he put it, isn’t so much an art form that soothes as one that trains its viewers ‘in the vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily’. Here apparatus means the phantasmagoric world of urban commodity capitalism that we take to be real, natural and given, and so accept fatalistically.
But there is more. Think of Greta Garbo or, if you prefer, George Clooney. Movie stars seem to be auratic, that is to say, their worship appears to be like that of Greek statues. As a result, the cinema appears to be another temple for the enactment of rituals. Benjamin had an incendiary idea about this which subverts the thought that Garbo and Clooney are akin to gods. Film acting, he maintained, is different from earlier forms of acting in that every film performance is a composition of separate takes, each of which has been assembled not by the actor, but by the director, cinematographer, lighting designer, executive producer, lighting designer. So the actor’s performance is broken up and edited back together. As Benjamin’s biographers argued:
this disjunctive, testable nature of the performance before the apparatus [i.e. camera, editing studio, cinema projection] makes visible something otherwise hidden: the self-alienation of the modern, technologised subject, the susceptibility to measurement and control. The actor thus places the apparatus in the services of a triumph over the apparatus, a triumph of humanity.8
Benjamin thought that the cinema held up to us a mirror of our condition – we too are technologised subjects, broken up, studied, reified in the same way actors’ performances are. For him, the new technology of mechanical reproduction meant that the actor’s performance was ‘detachable from the person mirrored’. While earlier forms of acting, particularly in the theatre, involved performances that were not detachable and so had about them an aura, film acting was different The film star’s performance was ‘transportable and subject to a different control – that of the viewers, who confront it en masse’. As a result, we could break up the cult of the movie star by reflecting on how his or her performance has been mechanically assembled. ‘During long periods of human history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence’, wrote Benjamin, and his hope was that since our mode of sense perception changes thanks to technological innovation, from the enhanced perception that cinema allows us we can see that we have become things.
Benjamin’s technological utopianism is beguiling, and one can understand his hopes for it under fascism, but one could also argue the opposite: instead of making self-alienation visible, cinema can erase it. Instead of annulling approachability, cinema can extend auratic distance. The technology may, but needn’t, help us realise our alienation. And the training that Benjamin recommended in order to hone the new sensory powers cinema offers us is one that few have undertaken. What he seemed to be arguing for here is a kind of aberrant decoding. But the hope for such decoding involves an active, informed, politicised role for the cinema audience that, we realise with hindsight, it didn’t have, and is incredibly rare. Cinema, certainly in the hands of the Hollywood culture industry that Adorno and Horkheimer would excoriate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, has been an ideological tool for the domination of the masses rather than revealing to them their plight under monopoly capitalism. What Benjamin hoped would be consciousness raising has, quite often, been merely brain numbing.
‘Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’, wrote Benjamin. Again, one could just as well argue the opposite: that it tightens the bonds with more sophisticated technology. Our film stars are subjects of cultic veneration. The Italian devotee of Walter Benjamin, Roberto Calasso, wrote in The Ruin of Kasch that ‘every movie star is a constellation, incorporated into the heavens after being devoured by the gods’.9 The movie star is thus both a god and a sacrifice to the gods. More precisely, we might say that the movie star becomes a god only after being sacrificed. And what is true of movie stars is true of all celebrities: the culture industry produces gods and sacrificial victims by means of the same technology; indeed, it erases the distinction between them.
WALTER BENJAMIN had a blind spot about music. If he hadn’t, he might have written about jazz in the same utopian spirit in which he wrote about cinema. One could map his optimism about cinema’s revolutionary potential onto jazz, which, like cinema but more so, liquidates tradition, fractures, telescopes, alters our staid perceptions and has a subversive political potential, challenges ruling-class orthodoxy, and subverts affirmative culture. If the camera introduces us to an optical unconscious so perhaps jazz introduces us to an aural one.
Adorno argued that jazz does the opposite of all of these things. For him it has no revolutionary potential. What he attempts to do in ‘On Jazz’ is tear off the mask of this music to reveal what lies beneath. Jazz adds improvisation and syncopation to the standardised character of popular music in order to veil its own commodity character. What jazz lovers prize in jazz, then, is the fig leaf that conceals what it is: a mass commodity. ‘Jazz wants to improve its marketability and veil its own commodity character which, in keeping with one of the fundamental contradictions of the system, would jeopardise its own success if it were to appear on the market undisguised.’10 This imputation of cynicism seems laughably unfair. Did Miles Davis really veil his music’s commodity character? Were John Coltrane’s improvised sax solos disguised expressions of ruling-class orthodoxy? If you gotta ask, as Louis Armstrong once put it, you ain’t never gonna know. Where one might take jazz as a site of resistance, and in particular African-American resistance, to the culture industry, to the ideological apparatus, to white domination, Adorno saw nothing of the kind.
But these objections are themselves misplaced. Adorno was writing, not about African-American jazz (indeed there is no indication that he had heard it before his immigration to the United States), but about what he heard in Germany. But even before he heard the music, he was revolted by what he mistakenly thought the word connoted: ‘I remember clearly that I was horrified when I read the word jazz for the first time. It is plausible that my negative association came from the German word Hatz [a pack of hounds], which evoked bloodhounds chasing after something slower.’11 Later, when he heard the jazz of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, his revulsion didn’t diminish. The jazz he heard was upper-class entertainment for Germans rather than African-American art form. It was a combination of salon music and march music. ‘The former represents an individuality which in truth is none at all, but merely the socially produced illusion of it; the latter is an equally fictive community which formed from nothing other than the alignment of atoms under the force that is exerted upon them.’
The black American roots of jazz served, he thought, as factors that made jazz more appealing to its privileged, white European audiences. ‘The skin of the Negro as well as the silver of the saxophone was a coloristic effect.’ But he heard something else: he heard, in so far as jazz was the authentic African-American expression, not so much rebellion against slavery as resentful submission to it. Jazz, as Adorno understood it, was sadomasochistic. He thought it was suitable for fascism, not just because it mobilised military marches and acted through its collective characters as a corrective to ‘the bourgeois isolation of autonomous art’, but also because ‘its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sadomasochistic type described by analytic psychology’.
Jazz also suggested premature ejaculation. Its syncopation was, for Adorno, very different from Beethoven’s. While the latter involved ‘the expression of subjective force which directed itself against authority’, that of jazz led nowhere. ‘It is plainly a “coming-too-early”, just as anxiety leads to premature orgasm, just as impotence expresses itself through premature and incomplete orgasm.’ Later, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer would find in Hollywood cinema a similar kind of sexual disappointment: the culture industry, they wrote, ‘endlessly cheats customers out of what it endlessly promises, especially in terms of sexual pleasure. In erotic films, for instance, everything revolves around coitus because it does not take place.’12 Jazz, similarly, seemed to promise liberation but only delivered ascetic denial.
Jazz, as a result, involved symbolic castration. The weak modern male as performed by Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, who followed ‘too weakly the standard of the collective which has been unproblematically set’, found his counterpart in jazz: the ego of the ‘hot’ variety of jazz, he thought, expresses its impotence, perhaps even revels in it. By playing, listening or dancing to hot jazz, he argued, one submitted sadomasochistically to an authority while affecting to do the opposite – it was a form of self-alienation masking itself as rebellion.
The decisive intervention of jazz lies in the fact that this subject of weakness takes pleasure precisely in its own weakness … By learning to fear social authority and experiencing it as a threat of castration – and immediately as fear of impotence – it identifies itself with precisely that authority of which it is afraid … the sex appeal of jazz is a command: obey and then you will be allowed to take part. And the dream thought, as contradictory as reality, in which it is dreamt: I will only be potent once I have allowed myself to be castrated.
For Adorno, then, jazz involved a perversion typical of the whole of the culture industry. In embryo in this essay of Adorno’s is all that Marcuse would write about repressive desublimation thirty years later.
When Adorno got to the US he could have immersed himself in American jazz. There is no suggestion, though, that he did go to the jazz clubs on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, the heart of the West Coast jazz scene in the 1940s, where he might have heard jazz beyond the cynical philosophy he imputed to it. He might have heard, say, Charlie Parker, Lionel Hampton, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper and Charles Mingus. He not only didn’t, but continued to write anti-jazz jeremiads during his American exile and after. His 1955 book Prisms included an essay called ‘Perennial Fashions – Jazz’, in which he wrote: ‘Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a basic organisation of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhabitation, as within an articulate language, but rather in the utilisation of certain well-defined tricks, formulas, and clichés to the exclusion of everything else.’13
The deluded technological utopianism of Benjamin’s essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction finds its opposite in Adorno’s essay on jazz. One could substitute the word ‘cinema’ for ‘jazz’ in the above quotation and use it to summarise what Hollywood did to Benjamin’s hopes for art. Jazz, for Adorno, despite its musical montages, its shock, its technological reproducibility, was a ‘phantasmagoria of modernity’ and provided only ‘counterfeit freedom’. Arguably cinema, on which Benjamin had pinned revolutionary hopes, had become like the image of jazz that Adorno calumnised.
If Walter Benjamin had managed to cross the Atlantic and join the Frankfurt School and his friend Brecht in American exile, it’s possible he would have been disabused of his revolutionary hopes for cinema. He might have embraced America with the gusto of Fromm. He might have become a hero to the New Left of the 1960s like Marcuse. He might have got high with Charlie Parker and dug bebop. Charlie Chaplin might have played him in a Benjamin-scripted biopic. He might have been brought before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and there outwitted Richard Nixon and lived to a ripe old age as emeritus professor at Harvard. All the lovely American possibilities we can imagine for the Frankfurt School’s greatest critic exist only in a redemptive vision in which what has been smashed is made whole. In reality, a storm was blowing through Europe and Benjamin was about to become one of its millions of victims.