What Is Mechanical Reproduction?
A GEOLOGICAL HAMMOCK architecturally tethered at one end by its own shopping mall—foot by foot the most profitable in the American West—and at the other by Hoover Tower, its own right-wing think tank, Stanford University is slung up against the last mountain range this side of the Pacific coastline, its glens and palm-studded courts crisscrossed by streams of pedaling students swathed in red sweatshirts, some wearing red caps, all emblazoned with a primitivesque square-cut white capital “S.” It needs a theory, I thought, the first time I saw it, these precious children on bike-back: Why must they wear the name of the place where they are at? Is it tragedy: a balmy clinic where prestige mercifully fronts for Alzheimer-stricken juveniles, precocious cohorts of the obliviously ambulatory? They ride and ride and at night, fallen and exhausted, known by their sweats and caps, are swept up by Hewlett Packard and Xerox trucks, by common citizens too, and nestled away with their bikes, their feet still in the stirrups, half kicking. Guards check the pressure on their tires and the next day set them all back out on their runs, staring out over their square-cut “S”s, as if they don’t even know where they go to school.
This is a good theory, and much speaks for it. It may even cause us to comprehend with new kindness and heartbreak those often twinned Palo Alto infants in exercise perambulators, proleptically clad in their “S”-bedubbed red miniatures, their identically uniformed mothers jogging vacantly behind them. But even in these scenes the given theory does not make every detail equally transparent. Neither does it account for the campus shopping mall, or Hoover Tower, or explain why a dozen and a half piano practice rooms are dependably vacant, as is the elaborately appointed lithograph shop; it doesn’t explain why a Rodin Sculpture Garden mid-campus jams together eight major works on a concrete slab and looks more like a Rodin parking lot. And how would the theory explain the university’s own pont japonais—modeled of course directly on Monet’s, but narrowly installed between three towering administration buildings and seemingly imported from a miniature golf course, or a Fred Flintstone cartoon, but definitely not from Giverny? Thus, however broadly explanatory the theory, confronted with the many details that won’t stop nagging, a theory that explains less may ultimately explain more.1
On this score few theories of mass reproduction are better entitled to recommend themselves than Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”2 For this essay, virtually Benjamin’s namesake, is a condensed weave of non sequitur and untruth. This should be obvious from any review of its much-cited central tenets: Benjamin’s claim, for instance, that photography was the first revolutionary means of reproduction would have surprised pamphleteer Tom Paine. Benjamin’s argument that in mechanically reproduced newsreels and illustrated magazines the masses are able to break imagery out of its peremptory auratic shell and learn to bring all things closer, both spatially and humanely, in recognition of their transience, strains dubiously against the fact, for instance, that the omnipresent reproductions of Hitler in films and magazines hardly helped the German masses of Benjamin’s own time—people who to this day, along with their children and grandchildren, live under a quarantine on his image and paraphernalia—to clear their heads of their thralldom. This is of course not just a German matter. Worldwide hands fish lovingly into purses and wallets and fumble in bags hanging from walkers to extract ghostly smears of emulsion, those snapshots of whomever to provide the vision of a radiant individuality hic et nunc, distant at any degree of closeness. Clutch away the photo and tear it up, just to demonstrate Benjamin’s thesis of the power of mass reproduction over fetish, and tears, not disenchantment, would be the result. Or, consider Benjamin’s thesis that movies are a simultaneous collective experience. If so, why do two elbows converge with electric affront on a single armrest? And what then explains—when finally the celluloid loops out—that special display of dexterity as all succeed at piling untouched through the narrows of the flung double doors?
But if these many objections to Benjamin’s essay teeter on the self-evident, why have they been remarked so rarely? The essay itself must benefit from a kind untouchability. It has been able to evade critical scrutiny, at any degree of closeness; lodged in its articulations is a force that goes beyond each particular assertion and assures that the false rings true however it may be threatened. The essay, in other words, is itself auratic. And—demonstrating both its power and the untruth of its theses—its own untouchability has not in any way been reduced by the essay’s much-published and reproduced existence. Clearly, the essay is well protected on many fronts: its emphatic “Go to the movies, take snapshots, see the truth,” warmly crowns the updraft of mass culture with ethical rationalization. And—in support of the essay’s attack on art as art—these rationalizations fit tightly together with modernism’s own anti-art tendency, which may turn out to be modernism’s only enduring legacy. The literary journal Granta, for instance, extols its own challenging prose by asserting that “Granta, Britain’s best-selling literary magazine, is edited by people who don’t like literature.” But these ideological resources, which pair up frequently, do not suffice to explain the essay’s aura. Still, its inner workings—and those of that square-cut capital “S”—can be discerned: this aura has a form. And, though this form is manifest, point by point in Benjamin’s essay, it is most convincingly accessible in Benjamin’s idea of “mechanical reproduction.”
American and French readers of the essay will be especially compelled to question the contents of this concept if they stop to check back to the original because, if they notice, Benjamin does not use the word mechanical at any point in the essay, not even in the renown title, which would literally read, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (technische Reproduzierbarkeit). Throughout the essay each occurrence of mechanical can be replaced by technical. It is not that the English translator erred. The two concepts—mechanical and technical—broadly overlap; Benjamin’s essay does assume a context of mechanical devices; and, by implying the current antagonism of the distractedness of mechanism versus presence of mind, “mechanical reproduction” invokes a commonplace that was certainly a source of the essay. And compellingly, as a translation of the original’s many variations on the phrase technische Reproduction, the self-evidence of “mechanical reproduction”—whatever it actually means—recommends itself over the literal “technical reproduction,” whose weak semantic content dissolves unconvincingly.3 French poses almost exactly the same problems of translation, and it can be assumed that Benjamin did not hesitate to approve Pierre Klossowski’s translation of his essay as L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée for its inaugural publication in the Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung (1936).
Still, Benjamin might have regretted the compromise made in these translations. It is not only that film is the work of chemical, not just mechanical engineers, and cannot accurately be characterized as mechanical reproduction. More important, from title to epilogue, technique in its various agglomerations, including technical reproduction, threads an urgently avowed Leninism through an essay composed as an aesthetic pendant to Lenin’s doctrine of the identity of industrial might and socialism. Benjamin chronicles, for instance, the rise of technical reproduction from the woodcut to lithography, moving in lock step with the rise of socialism as a variation on Lenin’s thesis that “electricity plus Soviets equals socialism”; the essay’s opposition to custom and craft in favor of standardization, automation, and the univocity of scientific solution are all ideals that Lenin himself espoused in the Taylorism that he disastrously imported from American managerial science and endorsed as Communism’s only legitimate means. Benjamin exalts the ineluctability of the conveyor belt and ultimately a command economy when he praises the unrelenting gaplessness of film for dislodging the contemplative stance and private associations of the individual in front of a canvas; it is scientific precision that he extols in the surgical instrumentarium of the camera for its power to dissect life in contrast to the surface-bound magic of the painter’s handicraft (233), and it is to “technique” per se that Benjamin looks for leadership when he deplores the fact that society is not “mature enough to incorporate technique as its organ” and that “technique has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society” (242).
It is likewise to Leninist productivism that the essay owes a key aporia. For just as the insistence that technique is an absolute good prohibited Leninism from understanding why the forces of production, however ripe, did not compel society to take the necessary next step to a better world, so Leninism left Benjamin in the lurch when his theses came face to face with the reality of the movies of his own age, which he describes as “illusion-promoting spectacles” bearing a “phony spell” (231). The problem that arises from this confrontation is obvious: if technique automatically withers aura, why does a “phony spell” prevail in film as it exists? Benjamin solves this aporia programmatically, in fact, by situating the “phony spell” external to any investigation of the question of technique. He might as well blame foreign powers when he inculpates “the movie makers’ capital” for producing this spell by “an artificial build-up of ‘personality’ outside of the studio” (231).
The “phony spell” is aura once removed, a residual technique-resistant ghost hopefully made unrecognizable as aura when lodged under other syllables. This ruse, however, maintains the purity of technique only at a price: it prohibits any investigation into the techniques of mass culture in film. Thus Benjamin cut himself off from such insights as are contained in his earlier study of aura, “A Short History of Photography,” in which he distinguishes not between aura and the “phony spell” but between true and false aura, between the concentrated gaze of early photographic portraits and the gommage of pseudospirit instilled into faces and sunsets by the use of an erasure to “gum up” the negative in a prettifying manner. This technical critique of pseudo-aura could have become the source for a more profound aesthetics, and not just of film. Instead, however, Benjamin himself practices conceptual gommage: the exclusion of any technical investigation of the phony spell redounds to the untouchable aura of technique. Indeed the essay relies on the importation of a surplus indeterminateness to assert the self-evidence of the concept of technical reproduction. And it will be noticed that throughout the essay, however it extols technique, there is a minimum of genuinely technical analysis. It is a measure of the auratic power of the concept that it is possible to read this essay over decades without realizing that there is in fact no technical analysis of “technical reproduction” as an overarching process that includes photography and film. The broad power of technical reproduction is known only by its effects, which Benjamin presents as fourfold: 1. It results in many copies. 2. These copies are not dependent on the original to the same degree as are manual reproductions and therefore they can accent the original, regard it from various angles and magnify what otherwise escapes the senses. 3. It transports the original into places where it could not otherwise be brought, just as, to take Benjamin’s example, a photo makes a cathedral portable. 4. And, by producing copies of this sort, it destroys aura. These powers are inimical to aura because the auratic art work bears the radiant authority of tradition, which it accumulates along the tether that it spans out from the moment of its unique inception. This uniqueness predicates its claim to authenticity, which is the evidence of all through which it has passed. By providing copies devoid of uniqueness, by contrast, technical reproduction snaps the art work free from this tether of tradition and thus deprives the work of the authority of time that constitutes and shines through its untouchable presence hic et nunc. Copying the art work, therefore, must compel it to surrender any claim to authenticity and any resistance to scrutiny (220–223).
Aura, then, is the aura of authenticity. And it is evident that Benjamin, the collector, conceived it on the model of the authenticity that antiques store up in the nicks and divots they acquire as they change hands over the centuries. On this model art works could be thought to forfeit their aura by being copied just as does a pressboard knockoff of a seventeenth-century armoire. But had Benjamin more concretely investigated technical reproduction in the arts, aura would have shown itself to be a more complex object and he would have been obliged to conceive its relation to reproduction differently. For even a tango, performed in the privacy of one’s own bedroom, and only indistinctly executed, is not necessarily deprived of a degree of aura, an authoritative redolence of more than is there just because it is the umpteenth thousandth rendition and authorized by no writ of habeas corpus for the primordial movers. And if the tango seems all too manual in a discussion of technical reproduction, neither do hammers, strings, and escapements necessarily deprive a piano performance of the authority of its historical resonance hic et nunc. The piano is, in fact, an instrument of technical reproduction according to all of Benjamin’s criteria: it in principle produces an unlimited number of copies; these copies are indifferent to the factually original manuscript; and the performances can slow, magnify, expand, distort, test, analyze any section, and more than meet the listener halfway. A Beethoven sonata can even be performed at different places and with overlapping simultaneity without surrendering its uniqueness. But if the presence of the pianist’s fingertips once again threaten to corrupt even this event with the manual, musical recordings of Benjamin’s own day—and even dance films of his own decades such as Mary Wigman’s famous Witch Dance—were not and are not necessarily without the aura of their original, and this cannot simply be chalked up to the influence of foreign capital.
Perhaps it is unfair to Benjamin to cite these examples. In his correspondence he mentions a disdain for whatever made him tap his toes, an antipathy that also testifies to a limited interest in dance. And even challenging his arguments in the domain of painting might be foreign terrain because he could never have argued for photography as he does had he made himself familiar with modernism’s critique of photography as the illusionary, trompe l’oeil medium par excellence. But if music, dance, and painting were not his terre natale, this does not account for a literary critic of the highest order urging that “from the perspective of world literature” the emergence of the printing press is “merely a special, though particularly important case” (219). Even limited to the modest perspective of European history, the mutually countervailing impulses of this clause can only he explained by the need to dispose of what is hard to get rid of. Benjamin jettisons any consideration of the relation of the aura of literary works to their reproduction because literature is so obviously the result of technical reproduction as he describes it: it exists in any number of copies; even if it is a disturbingly human act, it eludes every narrow reification-hungry debate over the difference between the manual and the technical; it is separate from its origins, etc. And, all the same, while meeting every condition of technical reproduction, the aura of Absalom Absalom, for instance, is not necessarily canceled.
On the contrary, the aura of the literary art work depends on technical reproduction. Had Benjamin pursued this thread, he might have realized that his own insight—that exhibition value is necessary to art—implies that reproduction is not added into art but is inherent to it.4 This is apparent in the fact that, even before cathedrals became portable as photographs, masses of visitors were able to think back on what they had seen; and the inherency of reproduction to art is apparent again in the felt need to return in memory to a stanza to mumble through its syllables or to dredge up a song while the throat’s own incapacity takes the sound elsewhere. Each art work says, “Be like me,” without necessarily surrendering its uniqueness. Thus Benjamin’s key thesis that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220) is compelling only by the potentials of its negation; even the most imperfect reproduction of an art work is not necessarily lacking authoritative presence.
Benjamin requires that this implication be pursued when he writes that technical reproduction “enables the copy of the original” (220). In invoking the concept of the copy, he himself is implicitly obliged to admit that there is no true reproduction without the original: every copy is a copy of the original. But if the weave and pigment of a painting ultimately constituted the original, Kandinsky, for instance—on discovering that his new acquaintance Schoenberg was not only a composer but a painter—would not have requested photos of his works: “Actually, I can get along even without colors. Such a photo is a kind of piano reduction.”5 And if a musical composition were ultimately the material acoustic event, musicians—who often enough spurn the distortion free gold-coupled stereolab—would not be heard to say, provokingly, that they are not “really interested in how it sounds.” Historically, and especially in modern times, to the horror of art dealers and stirring public incredulity, artists like Giacometti and Francis Bacon have destroyed more art works than they saved, effectively taking the side of what transpires in every art work. Each art work rejects its factuality, as the thing it is, by its form, which is the process by which it consumes its appearance and reveals what is more than this appearance. It is the reality revealed in this process—however difficult it is to say what this reality is—and not its material, that is its original. And it is because the reality of an art work is external to it that even in front of our eyes it is hard to locate the work precisely. Thus the most important art works, by the power and sometimes violence with which they shed their appearance, may make themselves seem irrelevant, as if they stand superfluously in the way of their content and no longer need to be seen, heard, or read. Deciding never again to play or listen to music may be a kind of devotion to it.
If the original is not ultimately the factual work, then the copy is not necessarily deprived of the work’s authoritative aura and authenticity. It is important to realize, however, that while this criticism goes to the core of Benjamin’s argument, the critique itself comes from Benjamin. In his study, The Origin of the German Play of Lamentation, he writes that “the function of artistic form is to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth.”6 The “origin” of an art work is thus conceived as what wrests itself free by the power of form from the historical moment, though not in the sense of becoming timeless, but as a sedimentation of time that seeks fulfillment in a process that consumes its own appearance and ultimately transcends the work. “Origin” then—to cite Benjamin’s favorite Karl Kraus maxim—is not the historical beginnings of an art work, but its goal; and what is original in the work goes beyond it.
These several ideas from Benjamin’s own writings provide more than adequate resources to undermine the argument of the reproduction essay. Benjamin himself could have thought the contrary to each and every thesis of this essay, line by line. But, if so, his essay threatens to become substantially fishy. And, if it is not to be abandoned as such, it must be studied for its fishiness. Indeed the essay asks to be studied in this way, for it schools disbelief in itself. The essay is as a whole a credo quia absurdum est, though without making obvious what is to be believed. On one hand, the essay claims that film motivates the revolutionary transformation of the masses, adapting a proletarianized world to collective, critical experience and so forth. Yet, on the other hand, the essay at various junctures recognizes that this is not at all the reality of film. At one point Benjamin even writes, “As a rule no revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film” (231). In context, this disclaimer is a critique of the films of Western Europe. This criticism, however, must be much more far ranging, for to the acetate stock of the West he counterposed films from no other cardinal direction. In fact, his accolade to the movies does not positively refer to, or discuss, a single movie and, completely contrary to the name-blabby genre of so-called film studies, hardly mentions a single film by title.
But if it is obvious that Benjamin’s essay must be far more critical of film than the essay seems to state, where is the criticism lodged? An instance of what occurs throughout the essay is given by Benjamin’s film audience. It attracts attention by its uneasy stirrings. For what Benjamin claimed to see in the movies through its eyes is not what the masses of that age or this one ever saw or would be willing to see. The identity of this audience is in fact puzzling because the fascinated moviegoer who marches out of the cinema feeling Bogart’s trench coat dragging at his ankles cannot be recognized in Benjamin’s figure of the distracted expert in the middle distance who presumably leaves the theater in cool self-possession. However, this paradoxically skimming—though erudite—gaze, in which Benjamin casts the model film viewer, is familiar as one incarnation of Benjamin’s image of the Baudelairian flaneur, Benjamin’s own self-ideal. This is the viewer who is so remote from the proceedings that he identifies not with the actors but with the camera; trained to works of the highest level of aesthetic density and tension, he perceives nothing of the enthrallment of those on either side of him; even the opportunistic quarantine of the “phony spell” external to film probably pivots on a complete and learned lack of recognition of the auratic claims raised by the stars as they stare down on him. The eye that translated Proust and habituated itself to the arcane Trauerspiel would not have needed to struggle to see through the magic of movieland to penetrate to the screen’s bare factuality; his asceticism passes over the pornographic cornucopia without a twinge and instead admires the medium for its potential dimness.
With Benjamin’s critical eye lodged in their otherwise diverse faces, his audience is an exotic hybrid population. It did not exist in his age, and not before or since. Yet it is exclusively this nonexistent audience that Benjamin esteems as an inescapable fact and automatic result of the movies themselves. But just how little Benjamin could have believed in the actuality of this revolutionary audience is implied by the fact that he only exalts film itself for what his essay perfectly well acknowledges film was not: the proto-communist medium for the cognitive transformation of the masses. This is why anyone may notice that Benjamin’s applause for his topic echoes strangely throughout the essay. It is the form in which criticism is sedimented: film, in all its aspects, audience included, is praised exclusively for what it is not. And the eye that bestows admiration only where it finds nothing to admire is utterly at odds with what it sees. This is not, however, to say that the “’Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” is a critique à clef of popular culture. It could not be a sly rhetoric intending to stir critique under the mask of admiration, for Benjamin’s critical gaze is too disembodied, too unconsciously fixed in admiration, to be the work of a beleaguered dinner guest furtively mocking “a perfect evening.”
But if the audience in Benjamin’s essay is an elite critical eye masked as the masses enjoying themselves in a vision gutted of aura, it may be necessary for popular culture to revise its embrace of Benjamin. He is not a man of the people but an elitist who in this essay—rather than setting his critical gaze in self-conscious opposition to the status quo—sought to inhabit the masses self-obliviously with his own elite contrarian gaze. When this is realized, the essay becomes more comprehensible in its complexity and its broad historical context emerges. Benjamin intellectually made his way to the movie house in response to the same forces that shaped a long tradition of German cultural elites beginning with Lessing and Schiller and on through to Brecht. They—contrary to the American image of German intellectual life—have been far more isolated and culturally beleaguered than their counterparts this side of the Atlantic. Pursuing a Lutheran sense of the functionality of art, they hoped to overcome this isolation through the fulfillment of cultural aims by means of aesthetic praxis. Their various programs—for instance—for changing Germans into Greeks anno 400 B.C. by exhorting them to aesthetic play, were naive and myopic. If anything, by constantly exaggerating the idea of art as social praxis they made themselves the unwitting theorists of, and sometimes—as when Benjamin insists that Fascism fulfilled the aims of l’art pour I’art (242)—the adamant participants in the destruction of a hardwon cultural realm. At least Benjamin’s perceptions of film combine into so unlikely a portrayal of its reality that they deprive the essay of any evidence that he saw many films or was interested in those he did see. He makes this plain when he asserts that the only merit that can be attributed to films as they exist is their “promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (231). In other words, in the movies, this flaneur managed to sit still only by drubbing his wits into aesthetic reverie.
Benjamin sought to make himself Germany’s preeminent literary critic. Yet in the reproduction essay he sloughs off literature as relatively trivial in comparison with film. He was reputed as a collector, a figure to which he attributed messianic status, and liked to bestow his closest friends with rare first editions. But in the reproduction essay an antiquarian concept of aesthetic authenticity is developed only so that technical reproduction can be admired for its annihilation of authenticity. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” Benjamin rejects the magic of language, around which his early work was organized, in favor of the surgical powers of the filmmaker. As a scholar he acquired the most elite education and immersed himself so deeply in hermetic religious doctrines and his own secretiveness that his life’s project, the Passagenwerk, remains largely unfathomable. Yet, in the reproduction essay, film is praised for obviating whatever distance an object may hold from its observer and exposing it to mass scrutiny. Though he was physically so standoffish that his closest acquaintances would never have hazarded a hand on his shoulder, nevertheless, in the reproduction essay, he extols film for its shoulder-to-shoulder togetherness.
To conclude that Benjamin betrayed himself in a politically opportunistic and apocryphal work seems an understatement. But something else is involved in this essay than self-betrayal, and invoking this moral optic obscures that in these pages the continuity of his thinking is so rigorously pursued that the idea of “technical reproduction” gives unparalleled insight into his entire oeuvre. This becomes especially apparent in sections 9 and 10 of his essay where Benjamin briefly discusses film technique. The importance of these passages must be emphasized because, insofar as the essay seeks to establish film as the art form to end all art, they effectively provide a quintessential statement—however meager—of how technical reproduction destroys aura, which, as mentioned, is missing from the rest of the essay. According to Benjamin, the key technical event is this: the camera severs the actors who appear in front of it from their own likeness. They step in front of the camera only to renounce their image, and ultimately its unity, to the editing table. Thus, Benjamin claims, a “feeling of strangeness . . . overcomes the actor before the camera” because the actors’ “reflected image has become separable, transportable” (230–231). Having left the presence of the actor behind, aura—that is, presence—itself vanishes from the image.
Here Benjamin has provided a statement of the form of technical reproduction: it produces an image that is not a reflection of the self. This image was the object of Benjamin’s interest throughout his life, and on more than an intellectual level. Indeed, in the reproduction essay he gives evidence that the fascination this image worked on him had preconceptual origins. For when he elucidates the actor’s experience of strangeness in front of the camera he seeks to make this credible by speaking from his own experience: the actor’s estrangement, he writes, is “the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror” (230). Though the experience of the self split off from its likeness and the beholding of this likeness as foreign is for most everyone a potential yet rare, late night, event, Benjamin asserts this depersonalization as normative. He insists that it is the constant condition of the reflection in the mirror and, by this exaggeration, he implies that the experience of depersonalization was his own norm. This implied claim, however, cannot be taken at face value. Though it is possible to assume from his reputed physical standoffishness that he knew the experience of depersonalization well, he was too productive and his emotional life too complex to have constantly lived in this state. Rather his exaggeration has the quality of being just that and as such indicates an effort to cultivate an experience that was a spontaneous potential for him. Benjamin, in other words, sought to produce an image of himself that was severed from himself. “Technical reproduction” was for him an ideal. This does not have to be deduced from his one exaggerating comment of his experience in the mirror. On the contrary, it is repeatedly evident as the forming ideal of his essay as a whole. At every point that Benjamin asserts theses that are so obviously opposed to himself that those familiar with his work must rub their eyes in disbelief at whether this was actually Benjamin’s own thought, he is not betraying himself but rather demonstrating “technical reproduction.”
Benjamin’s taste, in other words, was for an image of himself to which he was not present. This was his parti pris for the dead and it endowed him with an unrivaled capacity to immerse himself in the antiquarian. Benjamin was revered for this power. Dolf Sternberger, the author of Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, voiced a generally acknowledged admiration for him when he thanked Benjamin for sharpening “my eye for the foreign and dead aspects” of historical documents.7 Benjamin’s affinity for the sepulchral made it possible for him to sift through the breathtakingly inert documents of German Baroque drama and rediscover and decipher allegory in its difference from the symbol. This distinction is complex, but it is initially glossable here as the difference between, on one hand, an image in which subjectivity withers away in the fragmentary form of a ruin, or a death’s head, in the experience of time as painful duration; and on the other, a radiant image in which meaning is fulfilled in the mystical instant of the presence of spirit.8 Benjamin developed this distinction in the Trauerspiel study in order to model a theological critique of subjective reflection on allegorical form.
If this distinction between symbol and allegory sounds familiar, it is because it is the same distinction made in the reproduction essay between the auratic presence of all time in the eternal moment hic et nunc, in which meaning appears as a totality, and the anti-auraric, cinematic image, in which the radiant presence of the face of the actor was constantly being stripped out of the image by the camera and deprived of wholeness by the ruin-making scissors at the editing bench, that is, in the experience of transience. The theological critique of subjective reflection in the earlier study, built on the allegorical image, later became a political critique built on the idea of technical reproduction. There is reason to be puzzled, therefore, when Benjamin writes in the later essay that “the technical reproduction of a work of art . . . represents something new” (218). How could it be something new if, after all, it was Benjamin’s own research that dates the form of this image some four hundred years earlier and provided its seminal interpretation? But if no one knew better than Benjamin its antiquity and content, he least of all would have allowed that he was betraying his claim to his previous insight into the Baroque. Rather he was reproducing this earlier insight technically: he states it in a form that fascinated him, one deprived of self-recognition.
Benjamin’s powers depended on a guardianship of the boundary line defined by depersonalization. And these powers were not only those of incomparable insight into allegory, but powers of miscomprehension and distortion. For, if one’s image existed in the mirror with the independence that Benjamin asserts, then, staying up late, there would be no double take in the mirror to check if one’s face had really lingered a split second overlong as one turned away. The double take is the self seeking itself when it does not permit itself to know what it is seeking. Depersonalization, therefore, is not the splitting off of one’s reflection as Benjamin stylizes it, but rather the form in which the self is adored while unconsciously defending itself against the guilt of the adoration. Certainly this is what is off-putting, to some, in the constantly reproduced image of the melancholic German critic, holding his weary head; it is the James Dean effect in the same range of photos for those who find that stance convincing. Likewise, if the movie camera did simply sever the actor’s reflection from the actor, as Benjamin claims, actors would view film rushes with indifference or morbid dread. But actors go to screenings to witness the emergence of their fame, which pivots on the exploitation of the separation of self and image, and the establishment of the primacy of the latter in the interest of the self. The “dizzy rise to fame” is a description that has much in common with the experience of depersonalization, and not least of all insofar as it describes what is sought after as involuntary. And, likewise, on some level everyone is familiar with this ruse. Otherwise it would not be possible to understand the insouciance with which people in groups pore over photographs of themselves when they would never permit themselves to be caught beholding their own reflection with comparable avidity. The snapshot, by its ostensible involuntariness, makes the defense of depersonalization available: the self is permitted to behold itself on the basis of an illusion of being on the other side of its self-seeking.
Benjamin did not want to know the content of his reflection. And while his writings are magisterial and irreplaceable—just this one essay founded the entire contemporary discussion of the question of the transformation of art through its reproduction and formulated the set of questions in relation to which Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory took shape—all the same, his work is sworn to rationalization. In the reproduction essay he decries Fascism for deceiving the masses with a “chance to express themselves” (241) without troubling to distinguish true from false expression. Likewise, in the Baroque study, he is drawn to and deciphers the absence of subjective expressiveness in allegory as a form of expression, but he never criticizes the actual inertness of the allegorical world he studied. He is rigorously antipsychological throughout his oeuvre and therefore only draws on psychoanalysis when it serves to avoid its insights, as when in the reproduction essay he insists that “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (237). But this claim only holds if the preconscious—here the world of a range of gestures that are easily brought into consciousness when they are specially attended to—is substituted for the unconscious, whose contents are accessible only by interpretation under special circumstances. Had Benjamin been able to make better sense of psychoanalysis he would have had the critical means to avoid the rationalizing kitsch of the preface to the Trauerspiel study, where he epitomizes the Idea as the mother’s face that lights up when the constellation of her children gather around her; he would not have made himself a spokesman of collective amnesia in his evocation of children as “messengers of paradise;” nor would he have won a place this year (1994) on a West Coast Storyteller calendar as one of a caste of New Age bards. It would likewise have deprived Benjamin of the boundary of depersonalization, and thus he would have been compelled to see that if he himself, looking into the mirror, is able to carry out the act of technical reproduction, then the camera is not all that austerely technical, nor all that opposed to the labor of manual craft. Rather, technique, as “technical reproduction,” is a form of subjectivity that he relies on to defend himself from knowing who he is while he seeks himself in absentia. Isn’t this, after all, the latent content of his argument in the reproduction essay? If the audience identifies with the camera—as he asserts—and if the audience can be recognized as Benjamin’s eyes—then it is Benjamin who is viewing the figure who seemingly struggles with the loss of self-recognition in the unreflexive mirror of the camera. This self-viewing is particular in that it is predicated on a taboo of self-recognition.
In the “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” Benjamin does not at any point investigate the aura of mass culture. On the contrary, he simply denies that it bears aura and explains why: technical reproduction makes presence wither by producing images that are not reflections of the self. But no investigation of mass culture is needed to know that Benjamin’s assessment of mass culture is wrong: it glimmers with the presence of more than is factually there. For even if Benjamin’s idea of technical reproduction balks at understanding what this aura is, his essay’s urgently self-oblivious gestures inadvertently give some clue: “technical reproduction” produces aura in the form of fascination, that is, under the taboo of self-recognition. The essay lives from the same aura as does mass culture, which has the ability to glimmer only with what the audience can be enticed to put there without recognizing as its own. The tautology of this aura—which mass culture is constantly compelled to experience as its unsatisfying satisfactions—is a definition of its falseness.
It is well known that Benjamin aspired to the construction of a text composed strictly of quotations. Insofar as this project of a work devoid of any affirmative trace of its author was never realized, Benjamin’s ideal of “technical reproduction” also remained unfulfilled. But this is not to say that the project and its ideal simply vanished. In Benjamin’s own decades, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Musil worked on closely related efforts. And, on a much, much more mundane level, self-advancement through the manipulation of various forms of anonymity and depersonalization has historically been the rule, not the exception.9 It is the ideal of the corporation, that société anonyme. And it is expressly shared by many when they speak of their lives as careers. The planned publication of the English translation of his Passagenwerk (The Arcades Project) will speak to this ideal by inspiring a manic professoriate in this country to disgorge volumes of assembled quotations in a mystery of selflessness and vita padding. It will make a comparable contribution to the enchantment worked by the historically arbitrary vicissitudes of Foucault’s episteme and attract the self-styled priest class of deconstruction’s self-seeking “Not I!” as it goes stale.
But while some faculty may still have to wait for the Passagenwerk translation, students turn out to be in advance of the learned. They have no need to study Benjamin to discover technical reproduction as a form. For what more ingeniously laconic presentation of the idea of a work composed purely of quotation than a primitivesque white capital “S” embossed on a red sweatshirt? In this subtly involuntary appeal to an anonymous power, their prestige, which they will have only so long as they are not it, they each head out over their handlebars, obliviously, pursuing their own better lives.