Benjamin’s writings are an attempt in ever new ways to make philosophically fruitful what has not yet been foreclosed by great intentions. The task he bequeathed was not to abandon such an attempt to the estranging enigmas of thought alone, but to bring the intention less within the realm of concepts: the obligation to think at the same time dialectically and undialectically.
T.W. Adorno (Adorno, 2006a: 151–2; emphasis added)
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) has always cut a difficult figure. Mystical Marxist, materialist Jew, he was the self-conscious embodiment of contradiction. He performed contradiction in his work and in his life. He triangulated friendships with any number of the most important and opposed intellectual figures of late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany from the anarchist and Marxist Left all the way to the proto-Fascist Right. His closest correspondents held each other in the deepest suspicion.
Benjamin’s writing – not quite philosophy (he abhorred deduction), not quite literary history and always more than mere journalism – is just as hard to pin down. It is inseparable from the pathos of failure and from the even greater pathos of his suicide. (He killed himself while trying to flee to America in 1940.) Benjamin’s professional disappointments were many. In the mid 1920s, he found himself unable (or unwilling) to secure a university position with his brilliant and intractable study of the Baroque, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama [Trauerspiel]. As a result, he spent the last 13 years of his life moving from city to city, apartment to apartment, living from small grants, little gifts and whatever he could scrape together from reviewing. All the while, Benjamin was working on his often promised and ultimately incomplete magnum opus, a study of Baudelaire and of the Paris of the nineteenth century. We only have a torso of this project: hundreds of pages of notes, a few preliminary drafts of essays and a string of brilliantly elusive aphorisms which have been bundled together by his editors in a book known in English as the Arcades Project. This volume, baffling and provocative as it is, is clearly not anything that Benjamin would have published.2 It comes to us under the sign of disappointed hope. It is not a ruin. It is a monument to that which was never built.
Apart from his doctoral dissertation, Benjamin only wrote one scholarly book – the study of the Trauerspiel – and a very slim autobiographical volume about the socio-geography of his youth, A Berlin Childhood around 1900. The rest of his considerable output comes in the form of essays and reviews. The essay and the feuilleton suited Benjamin’s talents, and in no small part Benjamin’s considerable influence lies with the fact that he was a formidable stylist. His sentences are notable for their paradoxical force, their arresting mixture of clarity and enigma. They are just as remarkable for the brilliance of their indirection. Two examples will have to do. His great theological meditation on Goethe’s Elective Affinities ends this way: ‘Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been hope’ (Benjamin, 1996: 356). At the other end of his career, in his last essay, ‘On the Concept of History’, he writes: ‘There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin, 2003: 392). In neither instance does Benjamin unfold an argument that would support these literally stunning statements. To go on to say, as he does in ‘On the Concept of History’, that the materialist historian reacts to the barbarism of culture by ‘brush[ing] history against the grain’ (Benjamin, 2003: 392) is not to explain the matter but to give it a slogan. In other words – and the words here are Benjamin’s – Benjamin is most interested in the lightning flash of insight, not the thunder of explication that follows (Benjamin, 1999b: 456).
Benjamin is not a social theorist as such. While he assumes that Lukács’s analysis of classes and class consciousness is generally valid, his own Marxism shows surprisingly little interest in the working classes. (Like his hero Baudelaire, his compassion goes not to those whom capitalism exploits but to those whom capitalism discards.) His investment in the notion of freedom has little to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat and everything to do with his rejection of the Law. So, even though Benjamin came under the sway of Marx’s thought in the late 1920s, his politics early and late always lean heavily on a distinctly German-Jewish kind of theological anarchism, one that we also find in the work of his friend, the great historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (Kaufmann, 2001). Indeed, Benjamin’s work is less about freedom than it is about happiness (the theme of his last essay, ‘On the Concept of History’). His utopianism is based on the assumption that fulfillment is within human reach yet rendered impossible by the present organization of society. Benjamin devotes his career to showing how the artifacts of culture both display and betray the promise of happiness.
In the Anglophone world, Benjamin’s influence does not rest, as it does in Germany, on the essay on Goethe or the Berlin Childhood or on the aphorisms on history. While the Arcades Project has attracted a fair amount of local attention since it was translated nearly two decades ago, it has not gained traction and, considering its fragmentary and often under-theorized materials, it is not likely that it ever will. Even if it does, it will never cast the shadow that the third version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility’ has cast since its first appearance in English in the late 1960s. Although Miriam Hansen’s brilliant and painstaking exegesis of the different versions of the essay have shown how its arguments and their development were riven by tension and conflict, the essay has been commonly taken to be a relatively straightforward celebration of film. It has been read as a call for what Benjamin in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) terms ‘a new barbarism’. It seems to advocate the liquidation of the outmoded privilege that is granted to traditional works of visual art and thus to demand the elimination of traditional aesthetic categories.
The rousing ending of the final version of the essay – the claim that the Fascists have aestheticized politics and it is for the Communists to politicize aesthetics (Benjamin, 2003: 270) – obscures its ambivalences. So does the force with which it comes down on one side of each of its constituent dichotomies. It plumps for the nearness that the contemporary ‘masses’ demand against the distance that inheres in the aura of traditional art; for exhibition value against cult value; for tactility against vision; and for bodily habit against disembodied contemplation. To get to the liquidationist position that he appears to advocate, Benjamin has to ignore contemporary film practices; he has to fudge his terms somewhat (‘tactility’ in the essay is a predicate of the visual, not of touch); and he has to present categories that need further elaboration (what exactly is ‘exhibition value’?). While Robert Hullot-Kentor’s dismissal of the essay as ‘a condensed weave of non-sequitur and untruth’ (Hullot-Kentor, 2006: 137) is unduly harsh, he is correct in his assessment that the essay assiduously ignores a good deal of Benjamin’s work on the aura during the 1930s. It thus seems to avoid his thought’s greatest insights (Hullot-Kentor, 2006: 140). One does not have to share Hullot-Kentor’s marked distaste for Benjamin to see that the ‘new barbarism’ that underscores both the second and the third versions of the ‘Work of Art’ essay goes against the line of argument that leads from ‘The Image of Proust’ (1929) through ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931) and ‘The Storyteller’ to the all important ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1940). This argument, whose exploration is more or less coterminous with the Arcades Project itself, is a defense of the aura in its passing and of the form of knowledge-experience (Erfahrung) that underlies the aura in its decay. In other words, for a good part of the 1930s, Benjamin takes up a line of inquiry that runs directly contrary to the ‘Work of Art’ essays.
My interest in pointing this out is not to choose sides but to note that Benjamin discusses the aura in two markedly different affective registers. In some places, he discusses it in a tone of liquidationist triumphalism, which seems to affirm the course of contemporary history. In others, he mourns it with a nostalgia that regrets that course. The important thing is that Benjamin strikes each of these notes in essays that are contemporaneous. He therefore appears to contradict himself. To see him as self-defeating or self-contradictory is tempting, but it misses the point of Benjamin’s triangulations. Benjamin wanted to redeem the truth-potential of all positions, no matter how vitiated those positions might have been. What is more, Benjamin courted misunderstanding. As Adorno reminds us in a discussion of Benjamin: ‘misunderstandings are the medium in which the noncommunicable is communicated’ (Adorno, 1983: 131).
Benjamin is a utopian – or, to put it theologically, a redemptive – thinker. In order to outline the utopian thrust of Benjamin’s thought and to see how one of its most important and elusive categories – the aura – is to be construed, I will begin by looking at Benjamin’s method and in particular at his notions of the constellation and the dialectical image. I shall go on to argue that by the end of his life, Benjamin had come to see that the utopian kernel of the aura had fled from art and had come to rest in messianic historiography.
Let me begin by taking to heart Adorno’s repeated complaint in his correspondence that Benjamin’s writings of the mid 1930s were not properly dialectical. We can see Adorno’s point in the ‘Work of Art’ essay itself, whose polarities are nothing more than mere dichotomies, categorical oppositions that do not engage each other. Unlike the other thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research, Benjamin refuses Hegelian dialectics. He avoids overt mediation through the totality. Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse follow Lukács’s account of reification and take the totality to mean social labor, the fact that under capitalism, commodity production organizes the whole of society. This organization ranges from the design of the industrial infrastructure to the very constitution of individual consciousness. As a result, all particulars take their shape and their meaning from commodity production. To ignore the mediation of the social whole is to fall into ideological illusion. Hence Adorno’s complaint in a letter of 1938 to Benjamin about the apparently unmediated recital of historical facts in ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’: ‘It does not do justice to Marxism, because mediation by means of the total social process is missing and you almost superstitiously ascribe to the enumeration of materials a power of illumination’ (Benjamin, 1994: 583). Adorno objects to Benjamin’s tendency to present facts – details of a wine tax, say, or of the use of iron in construction – as if they were self-explanatory, as if they were not defined and determined by the gravitational pull of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.
If Adorno is right and Benjamin’s work does not look dialectical, how do we explain what Benjamin was up to? Benjamin was by philosophical education and bent a Neo-Kantian. He studied with Rickert, and his correspondence of the 1910s is punctuated by his sometimes dyspeptic comments about the great Neo-Kantian, Hermann Cohen (Caygill, 1998; Friedlander, 2012). One of Benjamin’s most polemical works of the war years is the unpublished ‘On the Program for the Coming Philosophy’ (1918), a post-Kantian critique of Kant’s strictures on experience. Now, Benjamin’s Kantianism was in good part dispositional. Hegel was not to his taste. As he wrote to Scholem in 1918, ‘The Hegel I have read… has so far totally repelled me… an intellectual brute, a mystic of brute force, the worst there is; but a mystic, nonetheless’ (Benjamin, 1994: 112).
That said, Benjamin’s disdain for Hegel is more than a question of disposition, because it betrays a theological scruple. Even at his most materialist, Benjamin could write that the detailed interpretation of reality requires a theological method (Benjamin, 1999b: 460), and he is aware that his thought is ‘saturated’ with theology (Benjamin, 1999b: 471). Though Benjamin was not at all religious, Jewish theology served an important function in his work. With its insistence on G-d’s absolute transcendence, Jewish theology provided a way of thinking past the imminence of the bourgeois world that Benjamin so detested. (His emphasis on Judaism was itself in part a protest against the increasingly anti-Semitic bent of late Wilhelmine culture.) Benjamin argues at the beginning of ‘On the Concept of History’ that even Marxism needs the help of theological transcendence if it is to fulfill its ultimately utopian emancipatory promise. In short, from the beginning to the end, Jewish theology was central to his project.
Pantheism is the great Jewish heresy, and the monism that many readers find in Hegel is just part of that heresy. In this light, nothing could be farther from normative Jewish thought than the vision at the end of the Phenomenology of the Absolute Spirit internalizing through memory (Er-innern) its self-othering in and through history. What is more, the Hegelian insistence on mediation also leads straight to the Incarnation, where the divine and the natural meet and are sublated in the figure of Jesus. Judaism, on the other hand, only admits a linguistic mediation between God and humankind, Creator and Creation. That is why so many Jews have found so amenable the Kantian distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Even when Benjamin kicked against this distinction in ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ and sought out that Kantian impossibility – a metaphysical experience – he did it by Kantian, not Hegelian, means.
It is against this background that we can understand the importance of the constellation for Benjamin and how it replaces the dialectic in his work. The constellation allows him to represent the social totality without requiring that his representation fall into the dialectical trap of incarnation – of filling in the outline as if it were indeed a substantial figure. The constellation, as Benjamin outlines it in the Trauerspiel study, derives from Hermann Cohen’s notion of the ‘correlation’ and from Goethe’s notion of primal phenomena,3 even though he presents it in Platonic terms, as a new version of the doctrine of Ideas. In the preface to the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin claims that Ideas are objective interpretations of phenomena. They provide the meaning of things (Benjamin, 2009: 34). Benjamin’s concern lies with the representation of Truth, because his definition of Truth as ‘the death of intention’ (Benjamin, 2009: 36) eliminates all deduction. As Truth is opposed to scientific knowledge, philosophy cannot rely on the modes of representation that science uses. Rather, philosophy will present the Idea as ‘the arrangement [Gestaltung] of the context [Zusammenhang]’ (Benjamin, 2009: 35) of phenomena. It is this arrangement that allows the Idea to be represented, and it is this representation that reveals the outlines of phenomena as they truly are. So constellations of things are their arrangement into figures that make the truth of those things self-evident. As with constellations in the heavens, written constellations require readers, an audience that will connect the dots and see the figures that they describe.
Benjamin abandoned the doctrine of Ideas as soon as he introduced it in 1926. The Ideas are the means by which he smuggled in his properly theological interests. Benjamin never jettisoned the constellation, however. It would be the cornerstone of his work for the rest of his life, though he would come to revise it in the face of his encounter with Surrealism and his ‘conversion’ to Marxism in the late 1920s.
The chief revision to the constellation as a figure in Benjamin’s later thought comes with the introduction of the dialectical image in the Baudelaire studies and the Arcades Project. Benjamin clearly thought that the dialectical image was pivotal. In fact, it serves as the focus for the notes on epistemology and method in the file known as Konvolut ‘N’ of the Arcades Project. Even so, there is no consensus about what the dialectical image means and how it works. It is a notion that Susan Buck-Morss has called ‘overdetermined’ (Buck-Morss, 1989: 67; see also Pensky, 2002: 178) and which, on the other hand, Benjamin’s editor, Rolf Tiedemann, has called ‘undivulged’. Tiedemann’s charge that the dialectical image ‘never achieved any terminological consistency’ (Tiedemann, 1999: 943) can be leveled at most of the terms in Benjamin’s critical lexicon. Benjamin does not define his terms but allows meaning to accrete to them in ever new contexts. In other words, each term is part of a number of different constellations. In fact, each term becomes a constellation in itself.
This meaty formulation of the dialectical image from Konvolut ‘N’ ties the image to the constellation:
It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present [das Gegenwärtige], or what is present [das Gegenwärtige] its light on what is past [das Vergangene]; rather, image is that wherein what has been [das Gewesene] comes together in a flash with the now [das Jetzt] to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present [die Gegenwart] to the past [die Vergangenheit] is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what·has·been [das Gewesene] to the Now [das Jetzt] is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images…. And the place one encounters them is language. (Benjamin, 1999b: 462)
Some preliminary things are worth noting here. The first is that one of the results of Benjamin’s encounter with Surrealism was his fascination with images and his conviction that the image was the key to action. He wrote in One-Way Street (1926) that ‘[o]nly images in the mind vitalize the will’ and that ‘[t]here is no intact will without exact pictorial imagination’ (Benjamin, 1996: 466). So the will, the driver of conscious revolutionary change, depends on the image. The second thing to note is that the constellation here no longer consists, as it did in the Trauerspiel study, of mortified phenomena reorganized into a figure of the Truth. Rather, the constellated dialectical image has a temporal core. It draws the past and the present into a relation with each other. Where the constellation is ontological, the dialectical image is historical. Most importantly, the figure that the dialectical image describes is meant to have an explosive effect: it transforms the present [die Gegenwart] into the Now [das Jetzt].
What is the Now? Benjamin makes it clear at the beginning of ‘On the Concept of History’ that Marxist historiography requires theological categories. The theological category that most interests him is redemption, the task of making good the losses and the promises of the past. Benjamin wants to use redemption as a way of exploding the notion of progress, that version of history which insists that things are always getting better. In the Hegelian formulation, it is unavoidably apologetic. Even though Hegel recognizes that history is a ‘slaughter bench’, this bloodletting is necessary for the Spirit’s full self-consciousness and thus, for the final instantiation of freedom. So the problem with the intellectual commitment to progress – and, as Kierkegaard argued, its full brutality becomes clear in Hegel – is that it sacrifices all the intervening stages to the supervening goal, the bloody middle to the glorious end. The concept of progress does nothing for the people who suffered so that freedom could finally find its fitting end in the Prussian state. For Benjamin, writing in the shadow of the stunning success of Fascism and the imminence of war, progress had become an impossible notion to swallow.
How to redeem the utopian promise of the notion of progress while jettisoning its plodding narrative structure? How to transform ‘past’ and ‘present’ (which are merely markers of temporal succession) into ‘the what-has-been’ and ‘the Now’ (which are the cardinal points of Benjamin’s vision of conscious and consciously human history)? Benjamin claims that Marxist thought must employ a properly theological (and specifically Jewish) version of the messianic in order to break progress’s delusionary spell. A story from the Talmud will demonstrate the alternative to the slow crawl of progress that Benjamin has in mind. The Tractate Sanhedrin relates that a third-century rabbi was directed by the prophet Elijah to find the Messiah sitting among the beggars at the gates of Rome. (One of the messianic promises was precisely that the Jews would be able to throw off foreign rule, so this story has strong political overtones.) Rabbi Joshua duly went to Rome and asked the Messiah when he would come. Rabbi Joshua received the enigmatic and ultimately disappointing answer, ‘Today’. So the rabbi returned to Elijah and complained that the Messiah had lied. The Redeemer would surely not come today. To this Elijah replied, ‘Today, if you will but hear his voice’. In other words, messianic fulfillment is possible at any time and its potential charges every moment. This is how Benjamin reworks the Talmudic motif in his notes for ‘On the Concept of History’:
‘In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance – provided only that it is defined in a specific way’ (Benjamin, 2003: 402). So, against an either indefinite (if you are a Hegelian-Marxist of the Third International) or infinite (if you are a Kantian) deferral, Benjamin proposes the messianic promise that even today we could see the redemption of the world. The present can give way to the Now – the moment when the divine and the human touch – if we only heed the images that lead us to revolutionary action. In other words, Benjamin thinks that dialectical images are charged with messianic energy.
Benjamin does not give many concrete examples of how the leap into redemption might work, but he does provide a telling one in ‘On the Concept of History’:
History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. (Benjamin, 2003: 395)
The arc of redeemed history does not describe a temporal succession through empty time, the apparently natural flow of one damned thing after another. It is a construction, a constellation or, more properly put, a dialectical image. The French Revolution (the present) looked at Rome (the past) and in so doing, tried to fulfill the Roman Republic’s untapped promise of virtue and freedom. It remained untapped, because Brutus and his fellow conspirators lost in the end. The Republic was lost to the Empire. What is more, the Empire’s own utopian promises (universal citizenship, the institution of a universal rule of law) fell in turn to the Gothic invasions, and so on. The utopian kernel of each stage was sacrificed to the thumping, catastrophic reality of the next.
For Robespierre, however, Republican Rome was a living possibility and he was able to realize the potential of its ‘what-is-past’ in the fulfillment of an actualized Now. Even though more than a millennium separated the end of the Republic from the French Revolution, the two moments were separated by less than a breath for Robespierre and Saint-Just. The novum of the Revolutionary dream of Republican Rome marked both a rupture within the existing order and the eruption of a possible novo ordo seclorum. In an interesting aside in the Arcades Project, Benjamin defines ‘catastrophe’ as missing an opportunity (Benjamin, 1999b: 492). ‘History’, in its redeemed sense, then, means nothing less than grasping the opportunity and keeping the promises of the past.
Robespierre and Saint-Just form a dialectical image with the Roman past, and their past as it swims into our ken provides us with our own revolutionary possibility. All this happens in language, not pictures. Benjamin’s montage of time is linguistic. It’s also worth noting that this montage, the dialectical image, is not a narrative. If it did tell a story, it would mimic the ongoing catastrophe of ‘progress’. The dialectical image is thus the moment that stops that narrative and it therefore has a structural affinity with the revolutionary moment that pulls the brake on the chuffing engine of progress (this image too is Benjamin’s).
Benjamin wants to change our sense of history. That is why, in the definition of the dialectical image above, Benjamin calls it ‘dialectics at a standstill’. It marks an interruption of business as usual. The dialectical image is a way of writing or thinking that shocks thought out of the dogmatic slumber that we call ideology and helps us see what has not been seen or what cannot be seen, an intimation of the truly new. He describes it this way in ‘On the Concept of History’:
Materialist historiography… is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystallized… In this structure he recognizes the sign of… a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. (Benjamin, 2003: 396; emphasis added)
Like Kierkegaard’s notion of paradox, the dialectical image stops thought dead in its tracks and shows its limits. In Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, this arrest comes in the form of a chiasmus: the paradox of thought – that it wants to find its limits – leads to the thought of paradox. The absolute paradox is the paradox of the absolute. (Kierkegaard, 1985: 37–48). Benjamin too is fond of this kind of chiastic turn, most famously at the end of the essay on the Elective Affinities: ‘Only for the sake of the hopeless are we given hope’. Paradox forces thought to think about itself even as thought fails.
The term ‘dialectical image’ is itself paradoxical. As Ansgar Hillach points out, ‘image’ [Bild] describes a figure and a Gestalt, whereas ‘dialectic’ describes the unfolding and overcoming of a contradiction in time. A dialectical image contains the contradictions which give it its shape. The structure that results is not dialectic at a permanent standstill. If it is dialectics, the figure can only constitute a moment in a further development (Hillach, 2000: 186–7).
This paradox – how can an image stop dialectics altogether and yet still be dialectical? – brings us to the effect of the dialectical image. It also brings us back to the objection that Adorno raised against the portions of the Arcades Project that he read in the 1930s. Adorno complained that they ‘superstitiously ascribe to the enumeration of materials a power of illumination’. Max Pensky has shown how Benjamin’s discussions of the dialectical image cut in two opposed directions at once. On the one hand, the dialectical image hews to Benjamin’s Surrealist side. It is an intentionless constellation that provides an apparently instantaneous ‘profane illumination’. On the other hand, it is much more Brechtian. It describes a self-conscious construction that arrests unreflective ‘common sense’. It makes the audience think. The technique of montage can serve either version of the dialectical image (Pensky, 2002: 192–5).4
So how are we supposed to read the dialectical image? Is it a figure that stops the course of thought or is it meant to be the spur to further thought, the beginning, not the end, of dialectics? The answer, of course, is both. Even though the notes in Konvolut ‘N’ in the Arcades Project and the evidence of ‘On the Concept of History’ indicate that while Benjamin never jettisoned the hope that the dialectical image would provide the immediate illumination of an intentionless truth, he takes a position in his correspondence with Adorno that is more recognizably Brechtian and less mystical.
Benjamin countered Adorno’s charge that sections of ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ ‘superstitiously ascribe to the enumeration of materials a power of illumination’ by claiming that
[the] author’s philological interpretation must be sublated in Hegelian fashion by dialectical materialists. Philology is the examination of a text, which, proceeding on the basis of details, magically fixates the reader on the text… They share the magical element, which is for philosophy to exorcise, reserved here for the concluding part. (Benjamin, 1994: 587–8)
Benjamin’s defense would have been familiar to Adorno, because in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin had been careful to distinguish between commentary – or what he here calls ‘philology’ – and critique. Benjamin is happy to concede that the philological sections of his Baudelaire study cast the very spell of the commodity fetishism that they record. He then promises that he will break this spell in the dialectical materialist final section of the book. This section will step out of the magic circle and provide the theoretical underpinning that Adorno requires. Of course, that concluding section was never written.
In his letter, Benjamin then turns the tables on Adorno. He cites a moment in Adorno’s study of Kierkegaard, where Adorno seems to say that the effect of the mythical image in Kierkegaard – amazement or astonishment [Verwunderung] – provides Kierkegaard’s deepest insight into the relation of dialectics and myth.5 At that moment in his book, Adorno is quoting Benjamin, as he does throughout, by providing what is essentially a Benjaminian account of the dialectical image. (Scholem, disgusted by the ‘chutzpah’ of Adorno’s book, felt it was outright plagiarism.) Adorno argues that our amazement that the mythical coexists with the rational in the image is an affective index of the truth that we do not want to admit. Our rationality is tinged with the mythical. Our pride in our ‘enlightenment’ stumbles over this reality and we feel amazed.
Benjamin is careful not to appeal to Adorno’s authority here (Adorno’s authority rests on his unacknowledged citation of Benjamin in the first place). Rather, Benjamin corrects Adorno and therefore himself:
I could be tempted to invoke this passage. Instead I want to propose that it be amended (by the way, just as I plan at another opportunity to amend the subsequent definition of the dialectical image). I believe it should read: astonishment is an excellent object [Objekt] of such an insight. (Benjamin, 1994: 588)
The affective moment is itself not the insight but the object of the insight. Amazement serves as a catalyst for thought. In other words, there are two moments in the dialectical image. The image makes thought stumble, but thought then thinks about that stumble. To use the motif that Benjamin repeats throughout the Arcades, the dialectical image represents both dream and awakening, both astonishment and subsequent insight.
Benjamin thus switches places with Adorno. He attributes to Adorno the position that Adorno attributes to him. He criticizes Adorno for doing precisely what Adorno criticizes in him. However fair or merely tactical this moment is, it is important because it cedes to Adorno the undeniable fact that the effect of Benjamin’s constellations – in the more concentrated images of the Berlin Childhood or the more diffuse ones in ‘The Paris of the Second Empire’ – is less an immediate illumination than an amazement that needs to be thought through.
In this light, enigma and illumination are intimately related. Thus – as Adorno suggested – misunderstanding might well be the medium of the as-yet-unthought. Consider Benjamin’s reflections on the story of Psammenitus in ‘The Storyteller’ (1936). Herodotus tells us that this Egyptian king did not cry when he saw his family marched as slaves in the triumph of his Persian vanquisher, but broke into tears when he saw his own servant being led away:
Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is utterly dry. That is why, after thousands of years, this story from ancient Egypt is still capable of provoking astonishment [Staunen] and reflection. It is like those seeds of grain that have lain for centuries in the airtight chambers of the pyramids and have retained their germinative power to this day. (Benjamin, 2002: 148)
Herodotus’s tale is an example of a dying genre, the story. The story (which Benjamin opposes to the short story, the novel and journalism) was born of an era of guilds and handicrafts, of manual labor and manual expertise. It is about wisdom, not information. It transmits the content of a collective knowledge-experience (Erfahrung) that gets woven into the fabric of the individual life at a not-quite-conscious level.6 The story does not present news you can use. It represents a tradition you can draw on. What is the aesthetic effect of the story? In this case, it is a form of astonishment [Staunen] that resembles in its way the kind of amazement [Verwunderung] that Adorno and Benjamin attribute to the dialectical image. And this effect is similar because its cause is similar. The image astonishes us because it confronts us with an unresolved piece of our archaic past. The sublimity of Psammenitus, his greatness of soul, has nothing to do with our present historical conditions. He is a defeated king whose tears speak – on the most superficial level – to ancient forms of paternalism, to kinds of warfare and social organization that no longer exist. Yet they remain compelling. They interest and perplex us. As Benjamin goes to some pains to point out, we do not have a ready psychological explanation for Psammenitus’s tears. Something else is going on and it seems clear to Benjamin that the tears make sense and no sense at the same time. They beg for the explication that Herodotus refuses to provide. The story thus stops thought and provokes it all at once. This is its ‘germinative’ power. Like the Roman Republic, it demands a Robespierre to fulfill it. Until that Robespierre comes, it will tantalize – even taunt – us.
If there is any accuracy to my reading of the structural analogy between the story and the dialectical image – an analogy that rests on our aesthetic reaction to both the story and the image – then the dialectical image has everything to do with the problematics surrounding the story and with the account of modernity that Benjamin develops in ‘The Storyteller’ and in other major essays of his last decade: ‘The Image of Proust’, ‘A Short History of Photography’, ‘Work of Art’ in all its iterations and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. It has to do with the depletion of collective knowledge-experience [Erfahrung] and its supersession by individual lived-experience [Erlebnis]. It has to do with the way that traditional wisdom – the very stuff of Erfahrung – has been eroded by the shocks to the human sensorium that the conditions of industrial labor, commodity consumption and urbanization have dealt. It has to do with the reasons that art is no longer transmissible and no longer has little, if any, critical, utopian core. In other words, it has everything to do with the aura.
Like the dialectical image, the notion of aura is overdetermined. Benjamin derived it from a number of different and conflicting sources (Fürnkäs, 2000; Hansen, 2008). It is also ‘undivulged’, to the extent that Benjamin barely defined it. Instead, he deployed it.
For Benjamin, the aura swims into view at the moment of its loss. The decay of the aura and the concomitant end of auratic art are historical facts. As I have already noted, his discussions of them are governed by mood. Either Benjamin mourns the fall of the aura (this is the case in the essays I mention above) or he views it with the ‘gaiety’ that he ascribes to the ‘destructive character’ and ‘the new barbarism’. But the end of auratic art that Benjamin celebrates most famously in ‘Work of Art’ in all its versions is the end of a historical process that is not about art itself. In other words, the decay of auratic art is collateral damage in a larger war.
Benjamin is a follower of eighteenth-century philosophy in the following respect. As aesthetics is primarily about our sensory apparatus, it is not about art but about our sensorium, the order of our perception. Benjamin’s particular contribution to that discussion is that he historicizes aesthetics. He assumes that perception is tied to – even dependent on – particular forms of experience and that these forms of experience are historically determined.7
As noted, Benjamin opposes two different modes of perception, two different kinds of experience Erfahrung and Erlebnis. It is important to see that each has its own particular time-sense as well. Erfahrung experiences time as duration, while Erlebnis is conscious of time as the empty succession of single moments. Erfahrung is tied to religious and communal ritual, agriculture and craft manufacture. Erlebnis is the creature of modern shocks: Taylorized line work, city traffic and modern technologies (including photography and film). Aura belongs to the historical sensory regime of Erfahrung.
Erfahrung and Erlebnis seem to be mutually exclusive. They fall into an orderly historical succession: first we have one, then the other. As Benjamin presents them in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Erfahrung and the aura are depleted – and eventually extinguished – by the victory of industrial capital and its new perceptual-experiential regime, Erlebnis. This is an important point. The ‘Work of Art’ essays notwithstanding, the aura has not been done to death by the specific technologies of reproduction any more than Erfahrung was done in by the assembly line. If Benjamin believes that culture is the expression of the economy, then experience must also serve as its expression. Erlebnis is thus born of commodity fetishism, not of technological change as such.
We would therefore do well to pose the question that Benjamin first asks in ‘A Little History of Photography’ and then repeats in the second version of ‘Work of Art’: ‘What is aura, actually?’ This is how he defines it:
A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance – this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch. (Benjamin, 1999a: 518–9)
Benjamin indicates that he lifts his emphasis on distance from the art historian Alois Riegl and from Riegl’s notion of Stimmung. Stimmung can be translated as ‘mood’ or, in a more Heideggerian way, as ‘attunement.’ But distance in Riegl’s famous article ‘Mood as the Content of Modern Art’ (1899) serves a very particular function. It allows art to body forth the totality of nature and thus compensate for the limitations of modernity’s understanding of the universe (Riegl, 1996). For Benjamin, though, auratic attunement performs a different function. The aura does not entail the fuzzy elision of particularity celebrated by Riegl. It marks the experience of the very kind of spatial and temporal particularity that Stimmung eliminates. Aura, then, reveals how a thing actually is a specific moment. Its ‘distance’ is precisely the appearance of a thing’s particularity.
The branch that throws its shadow on the observer in Benjamin’s definition of the aura makes more sense if we note Benjamin’s emphasis on the relation of the gaze to the aura in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’:
Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us. (Benjamin, 2003: 338)
Our sense of the aura would thus seem to rest on a categorical error. With the aura, we experience objects as if they were people. The relationship is one of reciprocity – hence the shadow of the object falls on us, and the object returns our gaze. It would be tempting to call such a relationship intersubjective, but Benjamin’s whole project is dedicated to leapfrogging over the subject. Benjamin seems to see the subject as a historical mistake, not a dialectical moment. Given Benjamin’s allergy to the subject, then, we might want to say that the auratic experience of an object lends objects dignity. It grants them the respect that is due, according to Kantian ethics, to subjects. It treats them as subjects should be treated, not as subjects themselves.
The auratic object does not decenter us, as Miriam Hansen has suggested in her magnificent account of the aura (Hansen, 2008: 351). Nor is the aura, as Carolin Duttlinger has argued, a forerunner of Barthes’s account of the punctum. She claims that aura involves ‘a play of identification between viewer and image’ (Duttlinger, 2008: 97; emphasis added). But the aura is not about specular identification. It establishes the proper attunement between humanity and nature.
I am arguing therefore that the moment of the aura contains a utopian dimension and that this dimension is precisely its temporal index. The aura points forward to our potential reconciliation with nature. Benjamin makes this clear in his footnote to the passage I have quoted immediately above:
Whenever a human being, an animal, or an inanimate object thus endowed by the poet lifts up its eyes, it draws him into the distance. The gaze of nature, when thus awakened, dreams and pulls the poet after its dream. (Benjamin, 2003: 354)
This dream of nature brings together the utopian thrust of both the auratic and the beautiful:
But even there, [the Romantic definition of beauty] had some derivative qualities. Its famous tenet that beauty is semblance – the sensuous appearance [Erscheinung] of an idea or the sensuous appearance of the true-not only coarsened the original teaching of antiquity but forfeited its basis in experience. This resides in the aura. ‘The beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil’ – this is the quintessence of the ancient aesthetic. Through its veil, which is nothing other than the aura, the beautiful appears [scheint]. (Benjamin, 2002: 137)
In this fragment from 1935, Benjamin makes it clear that the aura is not only that peculiar weave of time and space that shows us the object in its concrete particularity. It also shows us its utopian fulfillment, its ideal future. Squaring the circle between Goethe and Schiller, Benjamin sets up a polar tension between Schein and Spiel, appearance and play. The beautiful – and art, then – contains within it a kernel of time. It shows what nature, the world, should be, which, for the sake of shorthand I have called its potential:
Art (the definition might run) is a suggested improvement on nature: an imitation that conceals within it a demonstration [of what the original should be]. In other words, art is a perfecting mimesis. (Benjamin, 2002: 137)
The aura, then, speaks to the utopian function of art. It is an intimation, through play and mimesis, of a reconciled world.
The aura is thus a slippery concept. On the one hand, it appears to be a quality that inheres in the object. (That is why we can talk about auratic and post-auratic art.) On the other, it seems to refer to a relationship between the branch or the mountain and us, between the object and the subject. Thus the depletion of the aura either refers to a change in the structure of our relationship to objects or in the objects themselves. A mountain cannot be post-auratic, though an artwork can be. This also raises the all-important question of the auratic work in a post-auratic age. Benjamin’s attempt to historicize aesthetics while tracing them back to our experience of nature thus leads to interesting problems that he does not address. Perhaps they are problems that cannot be answered. In any event, he shows that the depletion of Erfahrung and the decay of the aura signal the flight of the utopian from both our experience and our art. As Benjamin writes in one of the notes for ‘Work of Art’, the problem for contemporary aesthetics is ‘to determine the effect of the work of art once its power of consecration has been eliminated’ (Benjamin, 2002: 141). Thus is it that ‘Work of Art’ asks what art can do now that its utopian core has been hollowed out. This goes some way towards explaining the essay’s liquidationist animus towards the aura, but it does not explain its claim – a false one, if my argument holds – that the aura now serves distinctly anti-utopian ends.
Of course, the ‘aura’ as it appears in ‘Work of Art’ is a ‘pseudo-aura’, an after-image created for an age of commodity aesthetics. The nimbus that surrounds the film star is not a real aura but a simulation that is essentially affirmative, not utopian. At best it apes the aura, invoking an ‘outmoded mode of perception’ for regressive ends (Fürnkäs, 2000: 141–2). At worst, it lends its halo to the Führer at Nuremberg.
Benjamin provides an account of the transformation of the aura into this pseudo-aura in ‘A Little History of Photography’. This discussion serves as a valuable corrective to the common impression that the technologies of mechanical reproduction are in themselves necessary and sufficient to destroy the aura. While mechanical reproduction helps undermine the aura of the visual arts – and ‘Work of Art’ is limited to the visual arts – Benjamin makes it clear that photography did not undo the aura. In fact, the question that lies at the center of ‘Little History’ is one that Benjamin outlines in his notes: ‘If the aura exists in early photographs, why is it not in film?’ (Benjamin, 1991: 1048).
In ‘Little History’, Benjamin notes that early photography is ‘a medium that lent fullness and security’ to the gaze of its subjects (Benjamin, 2002: 515–7). That fullness and that security are a feature of a somewhat primitive technology. The aura of early photographic portraits rests on ‘the way light struggles out of darkness’. The long exposure time of these early photographs leads to what Benjamin calls their ‘comprehensive illumination’, and it would seem – at first glance – that the lighting ‘gives these early photographs their greatness’ (Benjamin, 2002: 517).
But the weight of these photographs depends on more than just this ‘comprehensive illumination’. In fact, Benjamin notes that the technical limitations of early photography proved easy to reproduce as the technology developed. So the aura of early portrait photography is not merely a question of technology alone. Rather, the aura of these photographs is the result of the social situation that they capture. It rests with their ‘animated conviviality’:
These pictures were made in rooms where every client was confronted, in the person of the photographer, with a technician of the latest school; whereas the photographer was confronted, in the person of every client, with a member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat. For this aura was by no means the mere product of a primitive camera. Rather, in this early period subject and technique were as exactly congruent as they become incongruent in the period of decline that immediately followed. (Benjamin, 2002: 517; emphasis added)
The subjects of these early portraits were members of the rising bourgeoisie, and their ascendency lent them a personal presence that made their very clothes an expression of their being.8 The photographer too represented the latest technology, and that technology itself was congruent with both the technician behind the camera and the rising class in front of it.
In other words, the aura of these early photographic portraits has everything to do with the attunement of all aspects of the photographic situation: the class of the sitter, the technical knowledge of the photographer and the development of the technology itself. In this way, the circumstances surrounding these auratic photographic portraits resemble the circumstances surrounding the ‘story’ that Benjamin outlines in ‘The Storyteller’. There, too, the transmissibility of the story depends on an alignment between the stage of technology (craft), the class of the storytellers (who Benjamin imagines as craftsmen) and the class of the audience (also craftsmen).
This attunement between artist, subject and technology disappears in later photographs and as a result the aura vanishes. Why? Benjamin notes that improvements in the technology led to the abolition of that ‘comprehensive illumination’. The vignetting and the high levels of contrast which had granted ‘fullness and security’ to the earlier works were subsequently eliminated by improved lenses and lighting. As a result, photographers had to find ways of simulating the lost aura. Even an easily faked duskiness, though, could not hide the fact that the bourgeoisie had become brittle:
Notwithstanding this fashionable twilight, however, a pose was more and more clearly in evidence, whose rigidity betrayed the impotence of that generation in the face of technical progress. (Benjamin, 2002: 515)
Benjamin describes the impotence of the following generations as ‘the degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie’. Notice, though, that in the passage I have just quoted, Benjamin is not talking about decadence, but about the bourgeoisie’s impotence ‘in the face of technical progress’. The aura of early photographic portraiture was tied to the congruence between the relations and the means of production, a momentary equilibrium between technology and economic organization. But that equilibrium was tenuous at best. The tension between the means and the relations of production meant that the organization of society served as a brake against the revolutionary potential that the technology presented. So, as technology outstripped the forces that controlled it, those forces became enfeebled. They were reduced to fighting a rearguard action against the new rising class (the proletariat) and the insurgent potentials that lay embedded in the technologies of the new mass industries.
The decline of auratic photography was also due to the fact that ‘businessmen invaded professional photography from every side’ (Benjamin, 2002: 515). Photography was no longer a craft. It had become a modern business and the photograph itself had been transformed into a commodity. So photography no longer presented an attunement between the class being photographed, the technician and the technology. We can see, then, that the aura of early photographic portraiture was not destroyed by technology but by the changing social relations that surrounded it. Once it becomes a commodity for an atrophied class, the auratic portrait photograph is a thing of the past. The temporal dimension of the aura – its yoking of the archaic to the present to intimate a perfected future – is flattened and its utopian potential hollowed out. All that is left in this transformation is the pseudo-aura, and it is that pseudo-aura that the new barbarism (and ‘Work of Art’) must liquidate.
The aura is a difficult concept in Benjamin’s work because it both inheres in the object and is the medium of its reception. As we have seen in my brief account of early photographic portraiture in ‘Little History’, it designates a relationship that includes subject and object, viewer and viewed. This is why Howard Caygill has said of the aura that it is not ‘the predicate of a work of art, but a condition, now surpassed, of its transmission’ (Caygill, 1998: 101). In view, though, of the drift of Benjamin’s discussion in the essays on Proust and Leskov and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, I wonder if it would not be more correct to say that Erfahrung is actually the condition of art’s transmissibility. It is the collective knowledge-experience that allows art to be written and understood. On the other hand, art’s utopian charge lies with its aura.
Benjamin shows that the transmissibility of poetry, as Baudelaire discovered, becomes difficult, if not impossible, once the collective knowledge-experience on which the cultural heritage rests has given way to the individualized lived-experience he calls Erlebnis. Once poetry’s aura becomes untransmissible, then its aura cannot help but decay, because it has no medium in which it can persist. If the aura is indeed the aesthetic-perceptual prefiguration of a utopian reconciliation, an intimation of the kingdom of ends, then the decline of knowledge-experience can only lead to the decline of the aura. In short, Erfahrung is the condition of the aura’s transmissibility.
The new barbarism that Benjamin calls for, then, does not need to liquidate the aura. History is taking care of that quite well on its own. ‘The Work of Art’ essay is about shattering the privilege of the pseudo-aura, about destroying that nimbus of false consecration that surrounds art when it has become a commodity and a tool for regressive politics. This much has been clear to most commentators.
It is worth remembering, though, that the ‘Work of Art’ essay discusses the visual arts, not literature. The essay thus serves as something of an anomaly in Benjamin’s work. Literature complicates its argument, because literature has not been as susceptible to the technological changes of the last two centuries, at least not directly. So, the argument of the ‘Work of Art’essay does not quite transfer, and this is clear in Benjamin’s discussions of Baudelaire. The decline of collective knowledge-experience and of the transmissibility of the cultural heritage has been a feature of the commodification of literature, for sure – that is the argument that gets outlined in the aphorisms that make up ‘Central Park’ and in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ – but this has nothing to do with the printing press. It is indirectly tied to the technologies of communication but not to the technologies of mechanical reproduction as such. This is why Baudelaire is so important for Benjamin, why he serves as a model. The poet was able to turn the loss of the aura into a theme for auratic poetry. Les Fleurs du Mal might mourn the not-so-slow death of both the cultural heritage and Erfahrung, but it has become part of the cultural heritage itself. Through a brilliant legerdemain, Baudelaire made the individualization of lived-experience recognizable and thus general. In other words, Benjamin demonstrates that Baudelaire was able to secure a handhold – tenuous, of course – for both the collective knowledge-experience that he calls Erfahrung and the aura by thematizing their decay. Similarly, Benjamin’s essay on Proust shows that the novelist was ultimately successful in his attempt to reconstitute the web of the memoire involontaire that makes Erfahrung possible (Benjamin, 2002: 315–6).
I am suggesting therefore that Benjamin’s meditations on literature leave open a space for the aura in our post-auratic time. The essays on Proust and Kafka and Leskov indicate – again with qualification – that something resembling auratic art might still be possible in an age of Erlebnis. But Benjamin is not Adorno and is not willing to argue that the aura has come to rest in authentic art. Because he sets up Erfahrung and Erlebnis in historical succession rather than dialectical opposition, Benjamin cannot without contradiction be emphatic about finding a home for auratic experience in contemporary high art.9
Where does this leave the aura in the end?
In our relationship with nature and with art, the term ‘aura’ designates an experience that offers an intimation of transcendence and a foretaste of reconciliation. But hasn’t history foreclosed the aura and therefore redemption? Although Benjamin seems to come to this rather grim conclusion in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, the evidence of his other writing indicates that Benjamin was unwilling to let pessimism fall into despair.
It is worth considering ‘On the Concept of History’ for a moment. That essay – really a set of interlocking aphorisms and images – comes to us as Benjamin’s final testament. Its hero is not the artist or even the Angel of History (which appears in its most famous image), but the materialist historian, who seems to stand in for the revolutionary class. After all, the Angel sees in history nothing but ruin. It would like to raise the dead, make whole what has been broken. But the Angel cannot do this. The materialist historian, however, knows that he cannot resurrect the dead. He can only hope to bring their wishes to fulfillment through the revolutionary deployment of dialectical images that will in turn lead to revolutionary action. In other words, the materialist historian wants to raise any number of latter-day Robespierres through his writing.
At one of the darkest moments in European history, Benjamin looked around for comfort and he found it in a rather odd place – in Jewish messianism and in the writing of history. I have suggested that the temporal structure of the dialectical image is utopian. It reveals that every second is ‘the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter’ (Benjamin, 2003: 397). The dialectical image is pitched to redeem the dreams of history. In this way, it is very much like the auratic moment, which offers a foretaste of a world in which nature’s dreams are redeemed. This is why it is a mistake to take the ‘Work of Art’ essay as conclusive. Rather, it makes sense to accept Miriam Hansen’s argument that in all its versions it was always something of a long shot (Hansen, 2004).
While Benjamin was willing to admit that the visual arts had lost their utopian core and to concede that literature was on the brink of losing it – Proust and Kafka would stand as notable exceptions – he was not willing to give up completely. Literature might have been on the brink of completely losing its redemptive function, but writing was not. Benjamin’s final gamble – and this gamble was a mark of both the urgency of the times and of his staunch refusal to give in to defeat – was to locate the aura in materialist historiography and to settle it squarely in the dialectical image. As a result, he left us with a body of work that is as suggestive and as enigmatic as literature. From beginning to end, it is, as Adorno claims in my epigraph, dialectical and undialectical. This is of course a contradiction. But contradiction is not a fatal condition for thinking. Contradiction is the very stuff of paradox, and paradox, like misunderstanding, is a way of communicating the incommunicable or thinking the unthinkable. So, like paradox and like the dialectical image itself, Benjamin’s oeuvre continues to serve as a source of astonishment – a spur to think what has not yet been thought.10
1. This essay is dedicated to Jacob Bard-Rosenberg and to his future: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst/Das Rettende auch.
2. It is important to remember that the Arcades Project is not a book that Benjamin would ever have published. Giorgio Agamben makes the case very clearly in the Italian version of the work:
There is no doubt […] that the Aufzeichnungen und Materialen [the notes and materials, which constitute the bulk of the Passagenwerk] do not represent in any way a draft, however temporary, of the book on the Arcades, but only the documentary and theoretical research materials. Benjamin had a very clear sense in his work of the Marxist distinction between Forschungsweise [mode of research] and Darstellungsweise [mode of representation], which he expressly refers to in Section N: ‘Research must appropriate the subject matter in its details, must analyze its various forms of developments, and trace their inner connections. Only after this work has been completed, can the real movement be presented [dargestellt] in an adequate matter.’
In other words, the Arcades Project is an important tool for Benjamin scholarship but should not be treated as a finished work, any more than the notes for the ‘Work of Art’ can be substituted for that essay itself. (Agamben, 1986: xviii–xix)
3. Here is Benjamin’s testimony of his theoretical debt to Goethe:
In studying Simmel’s presentation of Goethe’s concept of truth, I came to see very clearly that my concept of origin in the Trauerspiel book is a rigorous and decisive transposition of this basic Goethean concept from the domain of nature to that of history. Origin–it is, in effect, the concept of Ur·phenomenon extracted from the pagan context of nature and brought into the Jewish contexts of history. (Benjamin, 1999b: 462)
For a more detailed account of Benjamin’s debt to Cohen, see Kaufmann (2000).
4. Benjamin would answer Pensky’s incisive analysis by citing Simmel’s claim that for Goethe,
all the difficulties in knowledge end when the power of thought [Denkkraft] and perception [Anschauen] coincide in the representations of art. There the receptive part of perception catches the Truth without mediation, and the ‘Idea’ becomes visible in the figure [Gestalt] without any further mediation. (Simmel, 1913: 57)
The dialectical image, like the constellation, then becomes something like Goethe’s Ur-phenomenon – a true, ideal form that actually exists. But the Goethean solution to the problem of the difference between the subject and the object, the particular and the universal, between sensuous intuition and the Truth, only works if you presume that perception gives us immediate access to the Truth of forms because of a pre-existing adequation of the senses to the universe:
The unity of the world lives in an unmediated way in phenomena and all the faculties of cognition of a particular subject are so fitted and adjusted [to the world] that the subject cannot find any content for itself beyond the appearances that are given to him. (Simmel, 1913: 58)
And the fact of the matter is that very few people – least of all Adorno – make that presumption and accept the Goethean solution. There are therefore certain limits to Benjamin’s intellectual eclecticism. It is very hard to cross Goethe, Kant and Hegel and maintain strict coherence.
5. Kierkegaard writes:
One may arrive at a similar consideration of the mythical beginning with the image. When in an age of reflection one sees the image protrude ever so slightly and unobserved into a reflective representation, and, like an antediluvian fossil, suggest another species of existence washed away by doubt, one will perhaps be amazed that the image could ever have played such an important role.
Kierkegaard wards off the ‘amazement’ [Verwunderung] with what follows. And yet this amazement announces the deepest insight into the relation of dialectic, myth and image. For it is not as the continuously living and present that nature prevails in the dialectic. Dialectic comes to a stop in the image and cites the mythical in the historically most recent as the distant past… They [images in Kierkegaard] are dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s expression… (Adorno, 1989: 54)
6. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today ‘having counsel’ is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence, we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding. To seek this counsel, one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life [gelebten Lebens] is wisdom. The art of storytelling is nearing its end because the epic side of truth – wisdom – is dying out. (Benjamin, 2002: 145–6)
7. Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature, but by history. (Benjamin, 2003: 254)
8. Compare this with later generations who appear to be expressions of the fashions that they sport. One of the tricks of commodity fetishism, as Marx points out, is that it turns human subjects into objects and grants commodified objects a kind of spectral life and subjectivity. So it is hardly surprising that subsequent generations, however substantial and prosperous they might have wanted to appear, should be transformed into mannequins in the photographer’s studio.
9. Benjamin’s concept of the ‘auratic’ artwork largely coincides with that of the ‘closed’ artwork. The aura is the uninterrupted contact of the parts with the whole that constitutes the closed artwork. Benjamin’s theory emphasizes the phenomenon’s historico-philosophical appearance, while the concept of the closed artwork emphasizes its aesthetics…. What results from the disintegration of the auratic or closed artwork depends on the relation of its own disintegration to knowledge. If this disintegration remains blind and unconscious, it falls to the mass art of technical reproduction. It is not a fate external to it that such art is everywhere haunted by the remnants of aura but rather the expression of the blind obduracy of the works that results from their being enmeshed in the actual relations of domination. It is in their stance as knowing what artworks become… fragmentary.… The closed artwork is bourgeois, the mechanical artwork belongs to Fascism, the fragmentary artwork – in its complete negativity – intends utopia. (Adorno, 2006b: 183n)
10. I realize, coming to this end, that I have done little more than reiterate Habermas’s repeated critique of Benjamin, although in a different register. But here register and tone do count. Mood is indeed disclosive, and while redemptive critical theory relies strongly on the rationality of the arts and on aesthetic categories, the insights that it yields – and the astonishment that is their object – might not be available in any other way.
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