The Frankfurt School’s contribution to debates in the politics of cultural production and reception are widely acknowledged as among the most significant in Western Marxist critical theory, often standing in for, if not eclipsing, the whole of their project, especially in the sphere of Anglophone scholarship. This fascination often pivots around issues of art and technology, as the recent edited collection of Walter Benjamin’s radio programmes attests.
Deemed particularly indispensable are Theodor W. Adorno’s, as well as Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s, writings on the ‘culture industry’; Adorno’s texts on music; and his posthumous Aesthetic Theory. The list would also include numerous Walter Benjamin publications, prominently ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, ‘Little History of Photography, ‘The Author as Producer’, and his writings on Baudelaire, the commodity, and urban modernity in shorter essays and in the extensive research notes for the Arcades project. These authors, albeit the best known and most analysed, do not comprise the whole range of critical writing on art and culture by theorists who were associated with the Frankfurt School /Institute for Social Research [Institut für Sozialforschung]. There is Siegfried Kracauer, who focused on film, as well as on Weimar-era popular culture more broadly, and the relation of its characteristic forms and subjectivities to industrialization and inflation, as in the collection of essays titled The Mass Ornament. There are also Herbert Marcuse’s contributions in Eros and Civilization and The Aesthetic Dimension. Significant interlocutors included figures such as Karl Korsch, Ernst Jünger, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, as well as Martin Heidegger – a thinker principally opposed by the majority of the Frankfurt School writers, but whose traces can be found in the thought of Herbert Marcuse, an erstwhile student.
The salient motif that runs through all these writings is an inquiry into the position of art in capitalist social relations. The inquiry takes the shape of a non-dogmatic assessment responsive to social, technical, and historical currents that impact on the ‘aesthetic forces’ and ‘aesthetic relations of production’, in Adorno’s terms. Art is viewed both as exceptional to the prevalent forms of social and economic production, exploitation, and domination in capitalist modernity, and as fully integrated into them, thus tracing a founding contradiction for art as a social form in this historical epoch. Art can be the source of emancipatory drives, albeit ones always exposed to capture by reactionary interests located in the market (Adorno and Horkheimer) or on the spectrum of Fascist politics (Benjamin). The terms of these arguments are elaborated in a complex dialogue with precursors in Western philosophy and philosophical aesthetics such as Kant and Hegel (as well as authors such as Nietzsche and Simmel for Benjamin in particular) but they unfold chiefly within a Marxist problematic, both in terms of categories and the political outlook, and through a dialectical approach carried out both at the level of concept and method.
The three structuring topics of this chapter will be the relationship between art and technology in the work of the Frankfurt School, including the notion of art as itself a type of technology; repetition as a dynamic in the field of art, and as a cultural logic more broadly, with reference to associated notions such as aura, singularity, and reproduction; and the currency of central categories of the critique of political economy, such as use value and exchange value, for the field of artistic production in capitalist society.
The set of questions assembled under the category of ‘repetition’ in the research and publications of the writers associated with the Frankfurt School encompasses subjectivity, fetishism, authenticity, modernity, the commodity, myth, transgression, and innovation. Repetition is viewed as a cultural logic that acts as a bellwether for how the productive forces of monopoly capitalism (the term most often used by Theodor W. Adorno to refer to the historical period elsewhere designated as ‘industrial’, ‘Fordist’, or even ‘late’ capitalism) are reflected, refracted, and stalled in the space of cultural production. For Adorno in particular, the main arena of application for the theme of repetition was the analysis of music, including Philosophy of New Music, the notes published as Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, the essays on jazz, and ‘On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’. These texts deploy arguments around repetition to alternately defend and dismantle hierarchies of ideas around ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music, the commercial and the avant-garde. The essays on jazz in particular have been noted for their rhetorical bravado, with one critic recently noting that this ‘writing is polemical, and not remotely dialectical’ (Ross, 2014). In these texts, Adorno develops a set of preoccupations around repetition as regression, often by juxtaposing what he sees as two strains of innovation in modernist composition represented by Schoenberg and Stravinsky. These two composers are placed in dialectical relation, embodying polarized tendencies in the single context of Western modern music. Schoenberg represents an experimental tendency associated with development, singularity, and appeals to difficulty in listening that evoke a strong subjective response, whereas Stravinsky is an archaizing modernist, dallying with myth and folklore, whose music has the opposite effect of drawing audiences into a fascinated acquiescence to a dramatic but essentially static and unchangeable present. Schoenberg is an exponent of serialism, in which repetition is a technique used to foster an appreciation of the non-identity of identity – an important concept for Adorno that will be taken up later in the mapping of debates around mimesis and ‘non-similarity’. There is also a historical thesis related to this assessment as, for Adorno, Schoenberg’s progressivism is embodied in the necessity of the twelve-tone technique coming out of previous technical developments in what he calls ‘serious’ (rather than what he sees as the empty marketing term ‘classical’) music, a technique which is adequate to its time. Stravinsky, conversely, by using modern techniques to refashion motifs from popular, folk, dance, as well as modern classical music, anticipates later critical theory diagnoses of the conservatism of postmodernism, inasmuch as his work is deemed to be giving in to mass taste rather than trying to push it further. It thus offers a superficial patina of transgression, dwelling on erotic display, ritualistic violence, and timeless human passions in a work like The Firebird ballet. However, the themes are mirrored in the music itself, whose repetitions and permutations negate temporality and development and, for Adorno, end up affirming reactionary patterns in contemporary culture.
Reaction is here understood as an unwitting reproduction of the economic forces consolidating capitalist homogeneity and social brutality at the level of that which is ostensibly supposed to transcend it: culture (and this transcendence he will identify as a crucial part of the ideology it is poised against). Repetition is the main vehicle which embeds reaction in the structure of modern music, habituating listeners to a kind of mythic pseudo-individualization through its address to the real, the everyday, and even the timeless. Moreover, it carries with it a kind of frenetic ‘pseudo-activity’ that Adorno links to the neurotic reflex of repetition compulsion in Freud. Thus, musical restlessness is for Adorno a sign of impotence (in his writing on jazz, which Adorno will blatantly associate with ‘castration’), passivity, and indeed catatonia: ‘In certain schizophrenics the autonomisation [Verselbstaendigung] of the motor apparatus after the collapse of the “I” leads to the unending repetition of gestures and words: one already sees something of this in one overcome by shock. Thus Stravinsky’s shock-music stands under a repetition compulsion, and the compulsion only causes further damage to that which is repeated’ (Adorno, 2006: 178). This de-subjectivation is encountered on a mass scale with the hegemonic popularity of jazz, perhaps the most well-known target of Adorno’s denunciation under the colourful pen name of ‘Hector Rottweiler’, though the limitations of his sample are generally less known, confined as it mostly was to swing and big band standards. Jazz is defined as the sonic equivalent of a fully administered society – it has no history, no variation, no internal logic except that of profit and domination, the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment and the leisure-time extension of assembly-line rhythms. Its improvisations are shallow, relying on a steady metronomic backbeat, its authenticity spurious, with the traces of African-American grassroots culture subsumed by meretricious white commercialism. Jazz as a stage of expression for modernist individuality and archaic collectivity is equally simulated and emptied out, in Adorno’s view. The syncopated rigidity of technique, however virtuoso, ensures jazz’s ‘perennial sameness’ and encapsulates, for Adorno, the whole problematic of repetition as the cultural logic of stasis and regression under an ever-renewed commodity aesthetic. These are the rudiments of the thesis that will subsequently be elaborated in the ‘Culture Industry as Mass Deception’ chapter of Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, with its verdict of the totalitarian nature of mass-produced or industrialized culture as secured by the ‘element of repetition’, which is the consolidation of the rule of identity over non-identity and the engine of enlightenment’s reversion to myth:
But the more the illusion of magic vanishes, the more implacably repetition, in the guise of regularity, imprisons human beings in the cycle now objectified in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as free subjects. The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 8)
Repetition plays a rather more complex and productive role in the project of Walter Benjamin, whose writing covers a range of approaches to repetition as a critical idiom, from the studies on Baudelaire and the Parisian arcades as the fulcrum of modernity to the texts on film and photography. Concepts such as phantasmagoria, the ever-same of fashion, and a partial use of eternal recurrence are arguably more heuristic variations of Adorno’s suspicion of repetition as central to the logic of commodity fetishism – the ever-new as eternally the same. On the other hand, notions such as ‘expertise’ (the rational empowerment of workers rather than evidence of technocracy) and the significance of technological reproducibility for the possibility of proletarian (and anti-fascist) aesthetic experience are evidence that for Benjamin repetition came in a variety of forms and served a number of diverse purposes. Repetition in the emancipatory register was closely linked with reproduction for Benjamin. Repetition is a structural and technical aspect of reproduction, which has far-reaching social effects in a system premised on mass production, consumption, and distribution of (cultural) commodities. Reproduction has, at least tendentially, a de-mystifying effect which is, again, at least tendentially (and Benjamin would waver in the strength of his commitment to this tendency) in the service of progressive goals. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ testifies to this, although several of its premises are already present in the earlier ‘Little History of Photography’, and it has often been framed as the outpost of a later and more affirmative Cultural Studies approach to mass culture as a contrasting current of what is portrayed as the Frankfurt School’s ‘cultural pessimism’. The justice of such a framing will be discussed in the next section, along with a more in-depth outline of the arguments of both ‘Work of Art’ and ‘Little History’. For present purposes, it can be noted that reproducibility is key to Benjamin’s analysis of contemporary, technologically based artwork on the basis of its embeddedness in systems of mass distribution, but also to his analysis of how reproduction affects the ontology of the artwork itself. On the one hand, reproductive technologies such as printing, recording, and photography bring the artwork into proximity with the viewer; no longer unique in time and space like the temple relic or the painting in a museum, it ‘meets the viewer halfway’. It is indeed the prerogative of the mass public, especially the proletariat, to want to encounter cultural objects at as close a range as possible, on their own terms. On the other hand, the apotheosis of this drive for proximity and proliferation as the dynamic of culture in modernity is the film, the mass medium par excellence, for which reproduction is intrinsic: like photography, film is not just a reproduction system but a medium which is inherently reproducible (there is no such thing as a unique print; the economics of film production mean that many copies have to be produced and shown in many places; finally, film is constructed of many identical stills on a film reel which have to be shown in sequence to produce the illusion of movement). It thus entails the most direct emancipation of the work of art from the cultic value specific to the aura (uniqueness of existence in time and place). Uniqueness and irreproducibility as the hallmark of the aura – which can describe natural objects as much as devised ones – have generated much exploration in later projects of critical aesthetics, with art theorists in the 1970s and 80s such as Craig Owens and Douglas Crimp, as well as a number of critically inclined artists, picking up on Benjamin’s political arguments in favour of reproducibility in order to dismiss the relevance of painting and sculpture in favour of more ephemeral and technologically mediated forms such as installation, photography and film. More recently, Fredric Jameson has written on the ‘aesthetics of singularity’ to discuss how much contemporary art tends towards a horizon of ‘eventalization’, repeating the priority of time over space that financialized globalization has inscribed on an epochal scale over the neoliberal era. A correspondence is projected here between the unique occurrence in time of event-based contemporary art and the uniqueness of the tailored financial instrument.
Even from this short precis, the difference between Adorno and Benjamin’s views on repetition becomes apparent. For Adorno, repetition almost always stands for stasis and reaction, and the analogous term for his use of repetition is ‘regression’. In Benjamin’s more sanguine view, repetition is more ambiguous, and the accompanying category is ‘reproduction’, which, especially when it comes to the role of political aesthetics, is on the side of progress, or, more accurately, helps to redefine progress so that it addresses social as well as technological development. The differences come to the fore in a correspondence conducted between the two in 1937 concerning the prospect of the publication of ‘The Work of Art’ essay in the journal of the Institute for Social Research, which was at the time based in New York in exile from Nazi Germany, while Benjamin was in his own exile in Paris. Published in the Aesthetics and Politics anthology, as well as in volumes of selected correspondence, the letters see Adorno taking issue with several points relating to the shared interest in the dialectics of reproduction and repetition. For Benjamin, repetition, replication, and reproduction were all aspects of the socialization of art that heralded the demise of aura, and brought it into the sphere of mass politics as radical culture. A point of ambiguity picked up by Adorno here was that Benjamin’s argument that mass reproduction did away with the cult value of art was vitiated somewhat by the cult value of the commodity, a shift which was plain to see in Hollywood cinema with its glamour, glitz, and fabricated icons. In this light, Benjamin had himself touched on the notion of capitalism as a ‘dreamless cult’ in the early essay ‘Capitalism as Religion’. In summary, the cultural and aesthetic phenomena that Benjamin would endorse as dialectical negations of their analogues in capitalist social relations of production are deemed by Adorno to be neither dialectical or negative enough; for him they are simply extensions of those industrial analogues and their forms of structural violence. This will be picked up from another angle in the following section’s discussion of technology. It will be important to note here, however, that Benjamin had another critique of repetition that relied on a less sanguine take on reproduction, one which he shared with his close interlocutor Brecht and which Siegfried Kracauer would also espouse, in a different key. This can be framed shortly as scepticism towards the claim of photography (and, by implication, film) to represent reality – a representation which Benjamin saw rather as the reification of reality, as the critique of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) found in ‘The Author as Producer’ and ‘Little History’ evidences. Here we see an artistic technique that ends up confirming reality through its aim to deliver up an unvarnished reflection of it, and thus reconciling the viewer to the elements of that reality, be they shop windows or the abject poverty of urban slums. This is a critique which would be taken up in the 1970s and 1980s by critical realist photographers and writers such as Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler. Further, as Brecht notes and Benjamin agrees, no documentary image of, for example, a factory can tell us much about the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist society. Rather than such neutralizing reproduction, Benjamin cites Brecht, arguing that ‘something must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed’ at the level of content, while the relations of artistic production must themselves be transformed and socialized.
Common to both Adorno and Benjamin’s thinking around repetition and reproduction (as well as regression) is their engagement with the aesthetic-philosophical concept of mimesis. Having its roots in Aristotle’s theories of drama and Plato’s poetics, the concept of mimesis arrived with Adorno and Benjamin via German Romanticism and played a substantial role in their formulations of the aesthetic, making strong appearances especially in Benjamin’s early work such as the essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ and his habilitation thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It also occurs regularly in Adorno’s work, including the late Aesthetic Theory and throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment. Mimesis refers to nonsensuous similarity, the register of emulation and play which short circuits an instrumental and dominant approach of humans to nature. For Benjamin, magic and proto-sciences such as astrology are mimetic insofar as they discern reflections between the cosmos and aspects of human society and physiology. However, the best example of nonsensuous similarity is language. While mimesis has gradually and inevitably decayed, as we shall see in the next section, it returns anew in the relationship between human societies and their technologies. Perhaps it is more apt to say that the faculty of mimesis has been transformed, and that it is as historical as it is anthropological. Benjamin writes:
‘To read what was never written’. Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language. In this way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behaviour. (Benjamin, 1978: 336)
This is a theory of reflection, of cognition as determined by similarities, correspondences, and socially encoded affinities between the very remote and the interior as constitutive of communication, which is in turn constitutive of subjectivity. Thus repetition is located at the basis of language, and thereby of culture and art as emulations by social individuals of phenomena ‘out there’; they strive to understand the phenomena of nature in the act of mimesis by bringing them into the symbolic circle. Adorno’s deployment of mimesis, as is typical of his approach generally, is characterized by a more sharply dialectical view. He accepts the account of mimesis as a mode of enacting a nonsensuous similarity that is in contrast to the subordination of nature that confirms the irrational rationality of Enlightenment – the domination and exploitation of internal and external nature by the calculating subject. It is in the artwork that the entanglement of play and domination stages a concept of mimesis as aesthetic rationality. Art represents a historical advance towards rationality from its ‘dark precursors’ in magic and ritual: ‘The survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as ‘rational’. Adorno goes on to append a further dimension to the quasi-anthropological concept of mimesis in his formulation of ‘mimicry’. As in the contemporaneous writing of Surrealist and taxonomist Roger Caillois, Adorno takes the apotropaic behaviour of the prey blending in with its environment as a strategy of panic rather than wise adaptation, and extends this to an analysis of fearful conformity both in aesthetics and in social behaviour. If mimesis is (equivocal) play, the Kantian purposiveness without a purpose in the space of art, mimicry is the pathology that invites catastrophe as it tries to ward it off by submission to or identification with its agents. Adorno and Benjamin meet on this second dimension of mimesis, with both glimpsing possibilities in the unmediated identification with the triumph of exchange. This comes across in Benjamin’s writing on ‘empathy’ or ‘fellow feeling’ [Einfühlung] with the commodity or with exchange value: gamblers, financiers, and crowds at nineteenth-century Great Exhibitions alike learned to identify passionately with exchange value as such, rather than with the useful or sensory elements of commodities. For Adorno, it is art as the ‘absolute commodity’ which guards the portal to disenchantment and ultimately redemption which the simultaneity of use and exchange in other commodities succeeds in blocking.
‘Redemption’ is also a key category for Siegfried Kracauer, whose work by 1960 was dedicated to outlining a theory of the ‘repetitive art’ of film as an important vehicle of realism (as it photographically registers an event which actually happened somewhere, scripted or not) capable of renewing faith in empirical reality (resonating with Gilles Deleuze’s later writing on cinema, which argues in similar terms for film as capable of restoring faith in ‘the world’, albeit in different philosophical terms). However, it is acknowledged that Kracauer’s most substantive work on the cultural logic of repetition transpired over three decades earlier, in the Weimar-era essays collected under the title of The Mass Ornament. He engaged with the ascendant visualization technologies of photography, film, and mass spectacle, such as the Tiller Girls (geometrically synced formation dance troupe that were Weimar Germany’s equivalent to the Rockettes), in terms recognizable to readers of Adorno and Benjamin, appreciating the propensities of the new mass cultural forms both for normalizing stupefaction in the face of spectacle and for closing the coffin lid on the hegemony of elite aesthetics. In a language more immediate and journalistic than either of his Frankfurt School colleagues, Kracauer would similarly note the ubiquity of expertise and seriality, and the progressive potential of distraction as a resubjectivation of the collective in the experience of the cinema, an argument similar to that of recent theorists of media and attention such as Jonathan Crary, who notes the dual emergence of autonomization and control in the visual technologies of the nineteenth century. Likewise, Kracauer signalled repetition as the modality suitable for art in a time of industrial production and universal quantification, with the Tiller Girls as strict equivalents (but with an erotic surplus) of factory labour on the after-hours stage: ‘The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls. Going beyond manual capacities, psychotechnical aptitude tests attempt to calculate dispositions of the soul as well. The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires’.
Many of the debates on the role of technology in the corpus of Frankfurt School critical theory have tended to focus on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. This is not surprising, if we consider that the text directly engages with the implications of technology for aesthetic and social transformation in a manner rare among the publications associated with this group, and has been one of the most widely circulated and diversely interpreted of all their texts, for reasons relating to its subject but also the history of its publication and appeal to a range of intellectual and artistic constituencies. In what follows, I will recapitulate some of the key themes of the essay before placing it in the context of Benjamin’s critical trajectory and in relation to the work of some of his peers and later interlocutors.
‘The Work of Art’ essay saw its initial publication, after extensive revision, in the Institute for Social Research’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1936, translated into French in the character of a dispatch from Paris, where Benjamin was resident at the time. It was subsequently revised twice, and the third version was the authoritative one until recently when the second version (also from 1936) became more widely available. This is the version which is now deemed closest to Benjamin’s original intention for publication. The essay undertakes a genealogy of the socio-economic position of art through the optic of singularity and multiplicity. Art is seen to evolve from an object of religious ritual, carrying with it ‘cult value’, to an institution with relative autonomy – hence marked by ‘exhibition value’ – in the secular, capitalist modern era in the West, finally to emerge as an instrument of political and aesthetic socialization with the rise of cinema and mass media. The primary lens of analysis is the nexus between technological and social progress, secured by the evolution of film as a mass art in the age of mass politics, with both the good (communist) and evil (fascist) dimensions of the phenomenon. Like ‘The Author as Producer’, the essay is poised to intervene on the side of the anti-Fascist struggle at a time when defeat was already tangible, though not yet as decisive as it was by 1940 when Benjamin wrote the ‘Theses on the Concept of History’. Participation in aesthetic experience, made possible by technologies of reproduction, and the participation of the masses in self-determination – the abolition of relations of private property – were seen as inextricably linked. Crucially, such technologically enabled aesthetic experience, centrally film, embraces and to some extent compensates for the corporeal and mental impacts of modern life, with the innumerable shocks and syncopations of urban space and industrial labour. Here appears once more the ‘mimetic comportment’ that cuts across so much of the critical approaches to the aesthetic in the writers of the Frankfurt School, as Benjamin evokes the cinema of rapid-fire editing and dispassionate observation both evoking and liberating its viewers from assembly lines and aptitude tests. Technology is figured here as a pharmakon that inflicts the damage and offers the cure. It reminds the subject that she is not only a passive victim of its rationalizing brutalities but also a consumer and participant in the kinds of democratizing currents the ‘kino-eye’ of Soviet cinema or the voices of workers in mass media publications put into reach. Also important here is the positive reading of ‘distraction’ as opposed to ‘identification’ as a relationship to the media image, one which Benjamin endorses in terms familiar from Bertolt Brecht’s framing of epic theatre.
In the constellation drawn by Benjamin, film is the apex of the irresistible tendency carried by technologies of reproducibility such as lithography, offset printing, and photography since the nineteenth century, and earlier still, with woodcuts, the printing press, and the craft industries of antiquity. Techniques of reproduction act to demystify obsolete but still effective (and to that degree equivocal, if not toxic) concepts in culture such as tradition, eternal value, or creative genius – notions eclipsed by modernity that movements such as Fascism did not hesitate to invigorate in their chthonic political mythologies of greatness and exclusion. Key here is the proliferation of copies which render the original irrelevant. The forgery of an artwork would only reinforce the authority of the original, whereas the original cannot stand up to its mass reproduction, as an image or a recording. Thus all reproductions, regardless of their technical or formal qualities, lack aura, that is, uniqueness in time and space. They hasten the decay of aura and the static and exclusive notions of authenticity, authorship, and property it contains – in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, its class-related ‘distinction’. While Benjamin does mention that certain reifications and commodifications can strive to recreate aura, such as the spurious iconicity of film stars, the argument has been made, already in Adorno’s response to the text, that Benjamin underrates the extent to which aura is a socio-economic rather than technological artefact – a criticism only borne out by the tremendous expansion of the art market and film industry alike in subsequent decades. However, Benjamin attempts to maintain a dialectical balance between determinism and the speculative in his account, noting the countertendencies of the decline of the aura, such as industrialization, capitalization, and the mass spectacles that ultimately habituate the popular masses to the ‘aesthetic pleasure’ of their own destruction in war.
An important aspect of the essay’s argument is the discussion of the subjective and psychic layers of technologized aesthetic experience. The factor of ‘shocks’ has already been noted, with Benjamin pursuing a theme elaborated in his writing on Baudelaire, that of the rupture of perception heralded by the modern city and consumption: ‘Technology subjected the human sensorium to a training of a highly complex sort … There came the day when film corresponded to a new and urgent need for stimulation. This shock-like perception comes into play as a formal principle in film’ (Benjamin, 2007: 175). Here we encounter a consistent theme in Benjamin’s analysis, that of the historical character of the human sensorium, an idea which emerges in historical materialist thought as ‘the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’ (Marx, 1974: 96). Another theme, pursued since ‘Little History of Photography’, is the one of the ‘optical unconscious’ – the camera’s ability to plumb aspects of perception unavailable to everyday vision, just as psychoanalysis discloses aspects of emotional life normally out of reach for the subject, further demystifying the real. The scientific and medical significance of these technologies of vision rivals its artistic import for Benjamin; nonetheless, he notes the astonishing consequences in ‘The Work of Art’. Everyday life appeared claustrophobic before the cinematograph opened it up with its changes of speed and scope:
Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its farflung debris. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. (Benjamin, 2002: 117)
To understand what was at stake in ‘The Work of Art’ essay’s hopeful politics of technology, we must attend to a conceptual pairing which scholars such as Esther Leslie have highlighted: Benjamin’s formulation of ‘first’ and ‘second’ technology (Leslie, 2000: 132–66). Departing from Georg Lukács’ influential notion of ‘second’ nature (the reified social relations mediated by the commodity form), Benjamin proposed that there was a ‘first technology’, which is instrumental, crafted as it is by humans to control and dominate the forces of nature, and a ‘second technology’, which is open to historical needs and which would be rather a means of reconciliation between humanity and nature. ‘Second technology’ is an index of social development, which is to say that humanity may fail to develop the social forms that match the complexity of the technologies at its disposal. The outcome of this misalignment is almost inevitably war, an analysis Benjamin applied to World War I and to the inter-war period of rearmament that preceded the global slaughter of World War II. Central to the notion of second technology as a space of development for human social and affective capacities is the notion of mimesis as a mediating Spielraum between human and non-human nature. Leslie argues that the transition between cult object and mass artwork can be mapped onto Benjamin’s characterization of the determinism of the first and the contingency of second technology in the concepts of semblance and mimesis, which Adorno would also develop at some length in his aesthetic theory:
Semblance is the most abstract – but therefore the most ubiquitous – schema of all the magic procedures of the first technology, whereas play is the inexhaustible reservoir of all the experimenting procedures of the second […] what is lost in the withering of semblance and the decay of the aura in works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-Raum]. (2002: 127)
We can thus see that for Benjamin, as for Adorno, there is the imprint of the ‘aesthetic forces of production’, which denote at the same time the role of technology in artistic form and the historically mediated development of the senses – the sensory being the original connotation of aesthesis. From here, we can move to examine Theodor W. Adorno’s engagement with art as a technology. The equation of art with technology makes sense in the first instance insofar as the phrase captures one of Adorno’s main parameters for art’s domain: the aesthetic domination of nature, implying both the violence of form over the material it shapes, and the index of an artwork’s adequacy to its period of production. Although the question of technology vis-à-vis the reproduction of the artwork, predominantly as it registers the sphere of music, occurs relatively frequently in Adorno’s writing, it is in the unfinished and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, and to an extent in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that it is addressed most extensively. For Adorno, partially in dialogue with Benjamin, the aesthetic forces of production could fall out of sync with the general productive forces, but this is because the forces of production in art, though seemingly behind in rationalization and efficiency, are actually ahead in terms of material imagination and experimental scope. For Adorno, this is due to a key tenet of what he defines as materialist aesthetics: the artist embodies the social forces of production without being bound by them due to the specific position in the social relations of production occupied by art: ‘the artist works as social agent, indifferent to society’s own consciousness. He embodies the social forces of production without necessarily being bound by the censorship dictated by the relations of production, which he continually criticizes by following the rigors of his métier’ (Adorno, 2013: 58). This then marks a certain dissociation between use value and technical development which can be explained in terms of the difference between the relations of production that obtain within and that obtain outside of art – a difference oriented around the respective influence of the subject:
There are historical moments in which forces of production emancipated in art represent a real emancipation that is impeded by the relations of production. Artworks organized by the subject are capable tant bien que mal of what a society not organized by a subject does not allow; city planning necessarily lags far behind the planning of a major, purposeless, artwork. (2013: 45)
The subjective content of the aesthetic forces of production, then, is what gives them their edge. This likewise accounts for the degree of modernity of any particular artwork, where modernity measures the adequacy of technical means to the differentiation of experience, not least the crisis of this experience (again echoing Benjamin in his diagnosis of the loss of experiential density in modernity). Hence, as Peter Osborne notes in a general discussion of the term, for Adorno ‘modernity’ is a critical and not a chronological category.
The bulk of the discussion of technology in Aesthetic Theory, however, is around the category of ‘construction’ which mediates the technical and expressive means in the making of any artwork. For Adorno, art has to reckon with advanced technology in its concept and construction, internalizing the challenge of social standards of production in its concept rather than boxing technology in to subject matter. Art has to reckon with the fact that the industrial organization of society penetrates social and subjective, and not just economic, life, thus running counter to all those who would see in the space of art a refuge or recompense for a fully rationalized, administered social world. The current state of the productive forces poses an internal problematic for artistic production, rather than a trivial external parameter confined to the moments of fabrication or exhibition, or an index of fashion to be superficially appropriated. However, Adorno’s line on technology’s relationship to the artwork is quite distinct from Benjamin’s. Whereas Benjamin is interested in how social infrastructures and technical means of production affect one another, and concretely reshape the ontology of artworks in turn, Adorno is more interested in the prospects technology generates for the autonomous artwork understood as a ‘plenipotentiary’ for, rather than (as ‘The Work of Art’ suggests) a practical instrument of, emancipated social experience. For Adorno, in one of his many suggestive (and among his more enigmatic) conceptual turns, the subject itself is a ‘congealed technology’ which came into use at a certain time and will just as certainly become outmoded. At the same time, this subject cannot be overlooked but must be retained as a dialectical category to be enlisted in the project of its own overcoming, as the introductory pages of Negative Dialectics emphasize. Moreover, neither emancipation, particularity, nor indeed aesthetic experience are thinkable without the subject. As Miriam Hansen has written, while for Benjamin, the potential antithesis within the system is generated ‘by the internal logic of the productive forces, i.e. technology’, for Adorno, it ‘rests with the category of the subject, however historically emptied out and ideologically manufactured it may appear’ (Hansen, 1982: 92). No less does the subject congeal as technology in artworks, by which Adorno means that the more independent of subjective influence an artwork is imagined to be, foremost by its maker (the chance procedures of Surrealism or, more aptly, the aleatory methods of John Cage or Fluxus), the more it evidences, if only in negative imprint, the role of subjective decision. Technology in this way becomes the site of elaboration of the aesthetic forces of production as encounter between the subject, its historical moment, and the artwork: an artwork using the most up-to-date technologies can still be regressive if it adopts a traditionalist stance at the level of its concept.
Picking up on the themes explored above with Benjamin’s thesis of first and second technology, as well as the arguments outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, we see here a concept of technology as a human activity that is not opposed to nature so much as a modality of liberation for both (human and non-human nature alike), a process that can be unfolded in the laboratory space of art. A liberated technology would be an index of rationality that has overcome its irrational side – domination, exploitation, control – and aims for a reconciliation between humans and nature which the ‘purposeless purpose’ of the artwork can materialize through subjective experience. In this sense, art is de facto a technology allowing us to envision an emancipated time. Art is bound up with the pressure of domination, both in its mandated control over heterogenous social and physical materials, and its existence as an alibi for a society of pervasive reification and unfreedom. Yet it mobilizes technique ‘in an opposite direction than does domination’, in alliance with the undirected space of mimesis which secures art both as play and as a form of (more-than-rational) knowledge. Mimesis acts to distil the opposing forces in art between expression and objectification, conveying the artwork’s immanent logic through the density of its technical procedures. Significantly, this is what separates autonomous art absolutely from the culture industry, which uses technology as part of a rationalization process like any other industry – albeit on somewhat diversified, idiosyncratic, and residually entrepreneurial bases – and in this way sacrifices what distinguishes an artwork spiritually, technically, and aesthetically from the rest of social life, truly cementing a totalitarian grasp over the imaginary of capitalist social life, as well as hinting at a deeper moral torpor: ‘The idea of “exploiting” the given technical possibilities, of fully utilizing the capacities for aesthetic mass consumption, is part of an economic system which refuses to utilize capacities when it is a question of abolishing hunger’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 111). By the mid 1960s, however, Adorno would come to a more nuanced assessment of film – one of the lynchpins of the culture industry in earlier texts – with his advocacy of the New German Cinema of his former student Alexander Kluge, among others. This assessment brought him to revise his former identification of cinema with the heteronomy exerted by technique – the very same reproductive technology that for Benjamin tied the medium inextricably to mass politics, and for Adorno to big business, and was thus a medium bound by the law of value rather than to a self-legislating artistic telos. Adorno proposes, then, that it is possible to see these two dynamics in conflict rather than in fixed hierarchy, as with any other artistic medium. The conflict is mediated by the potential of a dissident cinematic collective (comprising filmmakers and film viewers) which does not approach film as spectacle but as a passage through subjective interiority, closer to ‘imageless thought’ and writing.
As may have already become evident, Marx’s concepts of ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’ were highly relevant for the variant of materialist, politicized cultural analysis performed by the Frankfurt School, and these were closely linked, as shown above, with questions of technology as it shaped the forces and relations of aesthetic production. For both Adorno and Benjamin, there is a continuity of interest in ‘empathy with exchange value’ as a sort of productive alienation. For Benjamin, this signifies the forms of ‘training’ undergone by populations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era of ascendant imperialism, financialization, and consumerism. Figures such as the flaneur represented the Kantian attitude of disinterest cut with the capitalist subjectivity of detached, ephemeral investment in images, things, and people. The secret pedagogy of this ‘empathy’ is loss of tradition and the sway of social abstraction which tended towards the emergence of a revolutionary proletarian subject, in terms familiar from ‘the Communist Manifesto’ – a radicalizing process of disenchantment, commodity society as a ‘waking dream’ or ‘phantasmagoria’ that must be critically engaged with and excavated by the radical critic if the dreaming collective is ever to awaken. It prefigures utopia even as it embodies ideology. Adorno viewed this dialectic otherwise, as earlier noted, believing the proletariat to be largely subsumed to the teleologies of work and nation already by the 1930s when the communist movement had been quashed in Germany, and, after the war, bought off by Marshall Plan ideologies of plenty and democracy (a Cold War scenario to which Adorno, as well as the Institute for Social Research, had a complicated relation). He continued to hold out hope for the reconstitution or, more optimistically, transvaluation of the subject in aesthetic experience that resembled empathy with exchange value to the degree that the non-identity offered by the artwork to the viewer was materially based on a type of identity: identity with exchange value. The artwork was principally useless and thus constituted an ‘absolute commodity’. As pure exchange value, then, it helped to demystify the dual nature of the commodity which sustained the fiction that capital was as interested in social use as it was in profit and was thus a benign social system. Both Benjamin and Adorno also had a more prosaic version of ‘empathy with exchange value’, noting how as the commodity economy developed, the price of commodities became the chief fascination for the buyer, whether or not she could ‘afford’ it. The symbolic value of a commodity becomes the source of its fetishism beyond any use or enjoyment its possession could materially bestow, as Adorno notes in an aside on the desirability of expensive concert tickets over any specific performance they might give admission to. Thus all commodities tend to be hollowed-out of any use value and to be filled with consumer desire; not only, and perhaps not even mainly, artworks. As Susan Buck-Morss notes, ‘[I]f the social value (hence the meaning) of commodities is their price, this does not prevent them from being appropriated by consumers as wish images within the emblem books of their private dreamworld. For this to occur, estrangement of the commodities from their initial meaning as use-values produced by human labor is in fact the prerequisite’ (Buck-Morss, 1989: 181). For both Adorno and Benjamin, this estrangement could be progressive insofar as it disclosed the ‘real relations’ of capitalist social life, as emphasized by Marx in his discussion of the spread of social abstraction. Empathy with the commodity could have radical consequences, though it was Benjamin who would deem empathy with the commodity to be a source of libidinal energy that could be actualized in a revolutionary direction.
Benjamin, however, would develop another vector in his thinking around use and exchange value for the agency of art and literature in social change, a line discernible in the focus on the use value of media infrastructure (‘reproduction’) for social emancipation in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, but also in the use value of the artist and intellectual in ‘The Author as Producer’. In this essay, originally delivered as a talk at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris in 1934 (and prefigured in contemporaneous essays such as ‘The Present Social Situation of the French Writer’), he considers the need for the cultural producer to not just reflect on her position with regard to the productive relations of her time, but on where she stands within them, that is, how she can use her position to intervene and organize, in the first instance with other cultural workers and then in the relations of production more generally. Any work, no matter how radical in content, sees that content traduced by the all-consuming mechanisms of the market, and any political sentiments, no matter how radical, are traduced by the intellectual’s distance from the struggles to which she may seek to lend her critical support. Benjamin wants to hold on to a conception of an intellectual or artist’s specific skills and tasks and how these may be used to support social movements (as in Foucault’s notion of the ‘specific intellectual’), yet at the same time see how they may be generalized: in the transgression of the social division of labour that separates art and politics, the reification of the useless and useful, theory and practice. Such a division can only serve conservative ends, especially in turbulent moments like Europe between the wars. Moreover, he wants to think about the dialectic between proximity and estrangement, as in the work of his friend Bertolt Brecht, who fervently believed theatre had a role to play in the workers’ movement. This was not through simply affirming its slogans or programmes, but through working to provoke alienation – the ‘estrangement effect’ – from bourgeois dogma at the level of stagecraft and actors’ behaviour.
For Adorno, however, such an approach as Brecht’s was already far too affirmative, instrumentalizing the ontological distance art entertained to the brutal instrumentality of capitalist social life – or what he called its ‘negativity’ – ending up with an affirmation of use value as conceived and practised in this very life and not opening up a path beyond it. For Adorno, this constituted ‘praxisism’ – the notion that art or cultural production can and should be useful, for social change if not for society – and supplied the diagnosis Adorno would later use to excoriate Brecht for returning to East Germany after the war and putting his talents at the service of the state, as well as his own students for clamouring to apply the insights of critical theory to revolutionary strategy. In fact, art has to shun any imperatives that do not originate from its own aesthetic logic, even if this paradoxically cements its status as legitimating alibi for the continuing rule of those imperatives: ‘Art’s asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society. Certainly through its refusal of society, which is equivalent to sublimation through the law of form, autonomous art makes itself a vehicle of ideology: The society at which it shudders is left in the distance, undisturbed’. Yet, ‘[t]o evaluate art according to the standard of necessity covertly prolongs the principle of exchange, the philistine’s concern for what can be gotten for it’ (Adorno, 2013: 308, 341). Consequently, it was hermetic modern artworks that fully embodied opacity and resistance as key elements of their modernity, such as the plays of Samuel Beckett, the tales of Franz Kafka, or the music of Arnold Schoenberg, which, regardless of their ultimate approbation by the cultural establishment, give insights into the possibility of emancipated subjectivity, if only with the greatest obliquity and ambiguity. For Adorno, the artwork’s capacity for figuring social change is entirely immanent to its construction as a work, as a ‘windowless monad’ that refracts the outside world but in principle denies it. It has virtually less than nothing to do with the relations of production that the artist or writer operates within, as these are prima facie irredeemably distorted by the constraints of the market or the state. The role of the artwork is rather to hold on to and exacerbate the antagonism between its vision of society, and subjectivity, as it could be, and what it really was. ‘If artworks are in fact absolute commodities in that they are a social product that has rejected every semblance of existing for society, a semblance to which commodities otherwise urgently cling, the determining relation of production, the commodity form, enters the artwork equally with the social force of production and the antagonism between the two’ (2013: 321). This summarizes Adorno’s understanding of how the artwork occupies a conflictual space between autonomy and heteronomy. Far from the conservative notion of artistic autonomy – ‘art for art’s sake’ – this is an idea of autonomy produced by and thoroughly steeped in heteronomy, that is, the socially effective, determinate form of value: exchange. Exchange value is the dominant force on both sides, yet spirit has more room to move in the thoroughly fetishized space of the artwork without an atom of use value to conciliate it.
In sum, the question of value in the work of the Frankfurt School authors was frequently read through how the patterns of mass industrial production in the era of monopoly capitalism would extend to culture, just as they nourished the cultivated individual subject in the nineteenth-century age of liberal capitalism. For Adorno, notably, the analysis of art’s value relations would be deeper and more comprehensive, touching on the ontological relationship between the form of art and the form of value. Yet his cultural analysis is more widely canvassed than his aesthetic theory, given its more ‘accessible’ and programmatic character – and just as often dismissed for those reasons, with much of the dialectical force of that work left aside. We can note the striking correspondence between Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry as the analogue of factory production in the realm of the spirit and Kracauer’s discussion in The Mass Ornament, where value production is shown to be its own end both for corporations and for the large-scale enterprise of commercial culture. It is autotelic, not in the sense of autonomous art or ‘art for art’s sake’ but in the sense of profit for profit’s sake. Like a corporation, mass cultural spectacles are thoroughly integrated in all their functions but without any grasp of a purpose beyond themselves, and this comes to describe the whole of late-capitalist social organization:
Like the mass ornament, the capitalist production process is an end in itself. The commodities that it spews forth are not actually produced to be possessed; rather, they are made for the sake of a profit that knows no limit. […] Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality. Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers, and barely even observes it himself. (Kracauer, 1995: 78)
The conceptual constellations that have been sketched in this chapter around the terms art, repetition, technology, use value, and exchange value hold layers of nuance and lines of resonance with other concepts in the work of the Frankfurt School authors which it has been possible to indicate if not exhaustively describe here. The interested reader can refer to other chapters in this Volume to find further material on those points, and ones which may, no doubt, be framed through other perspectives and scholarly inquiries. The conclusion will thus indicate some perspectives and philosophical projects that resonate with the conceptual constellations of Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer, sketched above. These thinkers also remain prominent influences for practitioners who want to develop rich and dialectically reflected lines of opposition in the often all too affirmative bounds of contemporary culture, and contemporary art in particular. A well-known figure who has framed his project in archetypally Adornian terms is the United States artist, activist, writer, and publisher Paul Chan, who attempts to think through the conditions of artistic practice under current social and political conditions in terms both uncannily familiar to Adorno’s hypotheses in Aesthetic Theory, and ones filtered through the intervening years of postmodernism and notions of the technological sublime. A typical dialectical reflection might read, ‘Objective forces manifest in art today as subjective acts without an actual subjectivity, to express the power of inhumanity to define what is most human’ (Chan, 2009). We could also consider the return to questions of reproduction and reproductive labour in feminist discourses manifesting in the spaces of politics, art, and the academy which can echo Benjamin’s valorization of reproduction over uniqueness, its challenge to the sovereignty of the auratic art object, and its ‘exhibition value’ in favour of the impure, the derived, the everyday, and the invisible, albeit with an emphasis on questions of gender and race which were not explicitly within Benjamin’s purview. Likewise, questions around use value in contemporary art, explored by theorists and exponents of ‘social practice’ and ‘useful art’ such as Grant Kester, Shannon Jackson, Stephen Wright, and Tania Bruguera, while leaving something to be desired in terms of the dialectical complexity which attended Benjamin’s optimism, espouse the idea that art can exceed its institutional bounds (including its in-house habits of institutional critique) and become a technique in the building of social movements and community bonds – an approach very much reliant on the ‘mass reproduction’ of images and information afforded by digital media.
Wider theoretical and political resonances are also of interest. We can map, for example, Benjamin’s speculative approach to repetition onto Gilles Deleuze’s writing on ‘difference and repetition’; or the evocative concept of ‘aura’ onto Derrida’s notion of the metaphysics of presence. The idea of ‘art as a techology’ can be articulated with Foucault’s theories of social institutions and discourses as operational forces, or ‘technologies’. The sovereignty of art’s autonomy – from use – in Adorno’s aesthetics echoes intriguingly Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ (the sovereignty of the useless and discarded), which itself converges with Benjamin’s ‘ragpicker’ technique in the Arcades project of mining the bygone and outmoded for the revolutionary sparks that may yet be contained there. Similarly, we can pick up on Benjamin and Kracauer’s guarded approval of mass forms of cultural reproduction insofar as they are fatal to the mystifications of ‘auratic art’, and focus it on the role of ‘reproductive labour’ in breaking down the mystique of (also artistic) production from a feminist standpoint. From there, we can also connect to the renewed debates around ‘usefulness’ in contemporary artistic practice in light of shifts in forms of support and experience driven by wider social dynamics such as global economic austerity and the pervasiveness of the digital. Finally, the proximity between mimesis, second nature, and Benjamin’s writing on first and second technology have found a lively echo in recent debates between scholars such as Jasper Bernes (Endnotes) and Alberto Toscano, which coalesce around the question of the role of present-day technologies in a communist future. There are myriad strategic no less than political dimensions to such questions, and the prismatic materialism of Frankfurt School critical theory has much to tell us as we again face a darkening social horizon.
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