There’s been a big delay between Part 3 and this part because I got married in October (woo!) and then I just plum didn’t feel like writing (boo!) The two events were not causally connected. Anyway, back into the fray!

We ended the last post on a dilemma, one horn of which makes “the objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature,” and the other horn of which transforms history “into the irrational rule of blind forces.” Neither of these two options proved to be satisfactory in solving the “problem of history,” which, recall, arises when we attempt to treat history as a social science.1

Lukacs now tells us that Marx resolves this dilemma by showing it to be an illusion. He says:

For in this historiography with its search for ‘sociological’ laws or its formalistic rationale, we find the reflection of man’s plight in bourgeois society and of his helpless enslavement by the forces of production. “To them, their own social action”, Marx remarks, “takes the form of the action of objects which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.” This law was expressed most clearly and coherently in the purely natural and rational laws of classical economics. Marx retorted with the demand for a historical critique of economics which resolves the totality of the reified objectivities of social and economic life into relations between men.

This is a tricky passage, but Lukacs is essentially saying that the push towards the first horn of the dilemma is the result of being in the grips of commodity fetishism. To understand how this helps resolve the dilemma, we have to say a bit about commodity fetishism.

In simplest terms, commodity fetishism involves making the specific error of mistaking relations between people for a relation between objects. But how could anyone make such a mistake?

Suppose that while at the marketplace, you and I witness the (fair) exchange of 125 bushels of corn for 1 cord of wood2 (or 3 Gameboy games for 40 Pokémon cards, or 4 dining room chairs for 5 coats, or whatever—the commodities in question don’t matter). Upon seeing see such a transaction I might wonder why those goods exchanged at the ratio of 125 to 1, and come to think that the reason rests in some particular property or set of properties of corn or wood, such that, as it were, there is something in the cord of wood itself that commands 125 bushels of corn (or vise versa) when the two commodities are brought in relation to one another.

Why I would come to think in this way is a matter we’ll address shortly, but what’s important at this point is that in thinking this way I would be making a kind of error of omission. More specifically, I would be omitting the fact that the commodities in question, like all commodities, are the result of a production process, which, in turn, is the result of certain social relations holding between people (e.g., you cutting and stacking the wood, me paying you to do it; you having to sell your labor power to me, me being in the position to purchase it, etc.). And by excluding the production process, I would likely be confusing the product of a particular social arrangement for something independent of those social relations; in even simpler terms, I would be paying attention to the wrong thing in giving an explanation.3

Why might I come to make this mistake? The short answer is that this way of looking at the world is the result of the alienation inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Under capitalism, workers sell their labor power to the factory owner for a set amount of time, during which they work on some part of the commodity production process (e.g., soldering circuit boards, spooling yarn, bending girders, etc.). Crucially, when the day is up, the workers don’t take home any of the commodities on which they labored. Instead, those commodities remain with the factory owner and are either advanced to the next step in production—for example, the soldered chips are incorporated into a bigger electronics array—or are sent to the market as finished goods for sale. In either case, when workers encounters those commodities in the market, they encounter them not as the fruit of their labor, but as objects that command a certain price on the market (a price which the worker may or not be able to afford). As such, the product appears to the workers as something set apart from them with its own autonomous and independent life—as something that they can only gain access to again should they meet it on its terms.4 Thus, it is the very conditions necessitated by the commodity production process, and specifically the encounter of commodities at the market that encourages commodity fetishism and, consequently, the error that it entails.

Much more can be said about commodity fetishism, and much more should be said before one takes it on board, but this is enough to get us through this thorny section.5

Or at least enough to get through Lukacs’ explanation of how Marx dissolves the dilemma. Simply put, Lukacs is saying that the compulsion to find sociological laws of nature is a result of commodity fetishism, which is itself a direct result of the conditions of (commodity) production.6 Because academics and economists are as much in the grips of fetishism as anyone else, they invert the normal order of things. Instead of seeing commodities as the end product of a certain process that exists due to the enforcement of certain contingent social relations, they come to think of those commodities as constituting the beginning of a different process that ends in an understanding of the natural laws that dictate their behavior.7

The bigger point here is that commodity fetishism is not limited to how we think about commodities, but rather, because of the central role that commodity production has in how society is reproduced, its conditions affects (infects) our way of thinking about all other aspects of life, including the way we do science, philosophy, and history. Once we understand that this compulsion is a reflection of our particular (current) state and not a requirement for grasping the truth, we can also see that we are not forced into the first “universalist” horn of the dilemma. There’s no need to look for universalist laws of commodity circulation because the very compulsion that pushes us in that direction is premised on a false understanding of the world.8

So much for the first horn. But what about the second, “individualist” horn that transforms history “into the irrational rule of blind forces?” It, too, is exposed as illusory in the same fashion:

By reducing the objectivity of the social institutions so hostile to man to relations between men, Marx also does away with the false implications of the irrationalist and individualist principle, i.e., the other side of the dilemma. For to eliminate the objectivity attributed both to social institutions inimical to man and to their historical evolution means the restoration of this objectivity to their underlying basis, to the relations between men; it does not involve the elimination of laws and objectivity independent of the will of man and in particular the wills and thoughts of individual men. It simply means that this objectivity is the self-objectification of human society at a particular stage in its development; its laws hold good only within the framework of the historical context which produced them and which is in turn determined by them.

This is another difficult passage, but, thankfully, we’re already equipped to deal with it based on what’s already come before.

Recall that when confronted with the dilemma in its original form, the implication appeared to be that if history does not proceed along the lines of necessary and eternal laws of nature, then in the absence of such laws, it must proceed along the lines of individual wills. However, we now see that the absence of fixed natural laws governing social relations does not mean that what governs them must be the thoughts and wills of individuals. We are not forced to move from the realm of the eternal and universal (mathematical?) explanation directly to the realm of the particular and individualistic (unsystematic?) explanation. Rather, we can occupy a third space in which we can identify perfectly objective explanations of historical development, but which only hold as such within a particular historical context. We do this by subjecting to a critical analysis the logic of the social relations that hold within that context, and, in particular, the social relations that comprise the reproduction of society.

Do such explanations have the status of laws of nature? No—they don’t hold everywhere at all times and in all contexts. Does that mean that they’re therefore entirely subjective and grounded in the wills and thoughts of individuals? No—they are perfectly objective within a specific historical context.

But does accepting this third position mean that the ideas and actions of the individual do not make any difference to the process of history? Lukacs gives a puzzling answer, the untangling of which will take us through the rest of this entry:

[historical materialism] does not deny that men perform their historical deeds themselves and that they do so consciously. But as Engels emphasizes in a letter to Mehring, this consciousness is false. However, the dialectical method does not permit us simply to proclaim the ‘falseness’ of this consciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false. On the contrary, it requires us to investigate this ‘false consciousness’ concretely as an aspect of historical totality and as a stage in the historical process.

So, people do act and they act consciously, but their consciousness is false. This much is clear, and at this point, one naturally anticipates that Lukacs would explain what it means for a consciousness to be false. Instead, he tells us that we must analyze the falseness of that consciousness in the specific concrete moment, which, in turn, involves analyzing its relation to the entire process of history.

In one respect, this is fine—what he’s telling us is that we can’t say that the consciousness that Napoleon had when he willingly and consciously turned his troops towards Moscow was false tout court, but can only determine and analyze its falseness withing the totality of historical development. Again, this is fine, but the problem is that we don’t yet know what it means for Napoleon’s consciousness to be false within or without the concrete context in which calling it false is appropriate. It’s like telling someone “remember, the gleeba can only operate on state sanctioned roads” without telling you what a ‘gleeba’ is. It’s fine to know that it only operates on state roads, but that matters very little if you don’t know what it is.

Compounding our frustration, Lukacs continues not by giving us an explanation of false consciousness, but of ‘concrete analysis’, which itself is illustrated negatively by way of telling us where bourgeois historians go wrong. The issue is one of scope: bourgeois historians can only conceive of the limits of concrete totality as ending at the level of society as it exists within the current system of production. We’ve already seen what this looks like when we looked at the Adam Smith passage in the last section—because our society operates on the basis of commodity production for the purpose of exchange, therefore, all society everywhere must have on that basis, or, at the very least, must have anticipated the present moment in some embryonic state. Such historians simply see their present society as reflected back at them through the ages rather and fail to see, on the one hand, the actual development of all society through the ages, and, on the other hand, the need to explain that development.

In a way they operate a bit like the characters in this meme that I shamelessly stole, but which I think about more than I care to admit

Setting aside the question of whether any of the bros is correct about their particular era, we can see the two kinds of mistakes at play: first, each only reaches the limits of his9 own era and mistakes it as speaking for all; and second, none addresses the transition between the vastly different eras. Each explanation, thus, remains partial at best and false at worst.

If what has been described is not concrete analysis, then what is?

Concrete analysis means then: the relation to society as a whole.

Thanks, Lukacs…that’s, uh, really helpful. Let’s keep going

For only when this relation is established does the consciousness of their existence that men have at any given time emerge in all its essential characteristics. It appears, on the one hand, as something which is subjectively justified in the social and historical situation, as something which can and should be understood, i.e., as ‘right’. At the same time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately. That is to say, objectively, it appears as a ‘false consciousness’. On the other hand, we may see the same consciousness as something which fails subjectively to reach its self-appointed goals, while furthering and realizing the objective aims of society of which it is ignorant and which it did not choose.

At last, we have a definition of ‘false consciousness’, but it’s one that Lukacs is going to make us work for.

A couple of things are worth pointing out to help us: first, regardless of whether it is false or not, there’s a “subjective” element to any particular consciousness that makes it appear as normal and justified in its particular context. In other words, false consciousness doesn’t feel or look any different from “true” consciousness. “From the inside,” as it were, false consciousness appears the same way as, well, whatever your consciousness is now. The same is true for any previous time period—the right of kings over their subjects was seen as justified and appropriate under feudalism; of slavery under the rule of antiquity; and, of course, of private property of the means of production in our present moment.10 False consciousness doesn’t make itself apparent as such.

Second, the falseness of a false consciousness becomes apparent only in contrast to or against the background of its objective character. We know the character of the class’s consciousness only when we figure out what aims and goals its actually aiming for, and, crucially, what aims and goals it has in its total relation to society and not merely in the present moment.

This is a bit tricky, so let’s try to flesh it out.

Consider, for example, how this might be possible on the scale of individuals. Suppose that we have before us a heartbroken lover who, despite the conscious and intentional desire to move on after a break up, finds himself repeatedly driving by his former lover’s workplace, walking down the street where the two shared an apartment, and so on. From the inside, this person may feel like his behavior has a clear and rational explanation (“Driving by their work is the fastest way to get from my house to my parents’!”, or “Maple Street has the most gorgeous parks and it’s important to get exercise!”, and so on). And that might very well be correct—that is, driving past their former lover’s work may really be the fastest way to get from one place to another; it is important to get exercise—but when setting those rational explanations in context, it is also apparent that the behaviors in question nevertheless point to a further aim that is achieved in performing them: namely, running into the ex-lover.

We say of a person like this that he is operating with a false consciousness. But, crucially, we detect and recognize this consciousness as false within the broader context of what actually happens (and has happened in the past), and not simply by virtue of the content of the lover’s thoughts. It is only in the context of the heartbreak and in light of the fact that the former lover works at this place that the falseness of the consciousness is made apparent. If there were no heartbreak, or if the former lover worked somewhere else, driving down the street in question would not constitute an example of false consciousness (as, presumably, it doesn’t when someone else drives down that street). In other words, it is by contrasting the heartbroken man’s actions with what actions he would perform otherwise that we see them as aiming at something other than what he thinks he does.11

To round out the analogy, as with the individual, the falseness of the class consciousness is not something that is read off by looking at what the class “thinks” it is doing at some given moment, but rather by examining its “actions” in light of an analysis that establishes the objective aims of society as a whole.12 In other words, we do it by providing what Lukacs calls a ‘concrete analysis’. It is by supplying this concrete analysis—by tracing out of the dialectical developments (i.e., the dynamic back-and-forth interactions) between the classes as they engage in class warfare in relation to all of society—that we are able to contrast the particular consciousness of the class as we find it presently.13

More specifically, what this means is that in performing a concrete analysis, we are meant to establish the position that the class would have given the overall development of society. Thus, Lukacs says:

By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation.

Consider another analogy with waging warfare. In assessing whether a general is thinking “correctly” when engaging in a particular battle, we would want to consider not just what the general is thinking in the moment, but what a general taking such a battle would think given the development of the war. Does taking the battle further the aims of the war (rather than, say, the career of the general)? Has the last battle depleted the brigades’ supplies? Does the opposing general have air support? And so on. By learning the answers to these questions, we would be able to establish what a general would do if he were able to, as Lukacs says, both their particular situation (the battle in question, here and now) and its impact on the war. So with determining the consciousness of a class.

But here’s where it gets a little weird:

Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production.

Note, the consciousness of a class is not the aggregate (“neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class”) of individual thoughts or wills, but what is imputed as appropriate given the class’s position. Thus, the consciousness of the actual working class in the United States, for example, is what would be appropriate and rational for its members to do in light of, say, the decimation of the trade unions, the privatization of pubic resources, the destruction of the social wage, and so on. Crucially, this would be its class consciousness even if no member of the actual working class had any of those positions.

Is this the case? We’ll pick up here in the next section.

B. The Limits of Bourgeois Thought

To the best of my knowledge, neither Marx nor Engels claim that they were the first to discover what Lukacs calls “the essence of scientific Marxism” discussed in the part A. The fact that something more than an appeal to individual psychologies is needed to explain why history unfolds as it does must have been apparent to other people. Being sensitive to this problem, however, is not by itself sufficient for grasping what its solution must be.

Specifically, Lukacs tells us that bourgeois thinkers1 are aware of the fact that “the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them,” but they tend to assume that if that is the case, then those motor forces must have the status of laws of nature. Their attempts to offer a full explanation of any given particular historical phenomenon, then, become a matter of specifying which laws of nature—when coupled with which motives or set of motives—would produce that phenomenon.

Lukacs says that this approach is indicative of a more “primitive” level of knowledge, but it’s worth pointing out that from a certain perspective, it makes sense. Consider the rough division we used in part A to distinguish the proper object of history: on the one hand there are events that are the result of natural forces—rock slides, forest fires, monsoons, etc.—and then there are events that are the result of people’s desires and motivations—getting a beer from the fridge, writing or reading an essay, etc. On the one hand, there are events that are explained by appeals to the laws of geology, physics, and meteorology; on the other hand, there are events that are explained by appeals to the psychologies of individuals. If these two categories are exhaustive, then finding out that something more than an appeal to individual psychology is needed to explain some phenomenon means that we must appeal to a law of nature. So, why is it a mistake?

As we shall soon see, the problem with the approach becomes apparent when we consider the possibility that the two categories above are not exhaustive. What’s missing is what Lukacs calls “social institutions.”

These institutions are, on the one hand, independent of the will of any given individual. Consider, for example, the institution of marriage: one does not become married to (or divorced from) another person by virtue of setting their desires in motion. Putting aside the fact that the other person also has to have certain desires in place, there is also the fact that being married requires certain recognition from other entities (the State, the Church, the Community, etc.) that are independent of the will of the individual(s) in question.2 Perhaps more importantly, however, the institutions’ independence of one’s will does not mean, on the other hand, that they must therefore operate according to some eternal laws of nature.3 Even if it can be shown that everywhere where we find people, we also find some practice of monogamous pairing that is recognized by the community in which it occurs, it does not follow that there is some law of nature that people pair, or, more specifically, that they must pair in the way we currently observe. Rather, such social institutions constitute contingent ways of arranging society that then binds that society according to certain ways of relating to each other. Crucially, these institutions have a specific history which we can trace and submit to critical analysis.

This is, of course, not true when it comes to (genuine) laws of nature. Although there is a specific history of how Robert Boyle came to confirm the relationship between gas, pressure, and volume, it is not true that Boyle’s Law itself has a history such that, for example, there was a time before it held, a time in which it held for some but not all gasses, and a time in which it came to hold for all of them.4

The mistake that bourgeois thinkers tend to make, then, goes something like this: they begin by identifying a particular phenomenon situated in a particular social institution (or set of institutions), then they work backwards to establish what principle or law of nature must hold so as to produce that phenomenon. In doing so, they come to obfuscate the actual history of how that phenomenon arose and, ultimately, end up giving the wrong explanation.5

As an example of this mistake, here is how Adam Smith (a frequent target of Marx’s ire) explains how division of labor arose:

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in no view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given, or whether, as seems more probably, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contract…In a tribe of hunters or shepherds, a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison, with his companions; and he finds at last that he can, in this manner, get more cattle and venison, than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armourer. Another excels in making the frames and covers of their little huts or moveable houses. He is accustomed to be of use in this way to his neighbors, who reward him in the same manner with cattle and with venison, till at last he finds it his interest to dedicate himself entirely to this employment, and becomes a sort of house-carpenter.

- Chapter 2 “Of the Principle which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour” (emphasis mine)

Pay attention to what’s happening here. Smith has noticed the fact that some nations are wealthier than others and he wants to explain this phenomenon. He has also noticed that wealthier nations engage in specialized division of labor, and he correctly reasons as to how and why this institution makes the production process more efficient. So far so good. However, when he next turns to explain why this practice arises—when he turns to explaining the principle which gives occasion to this division of labor—he simply posits that there is a general tendency for people everywhere to 1) truck, barter, and trade commodities and, 2) to make contracts when exchanging those commodities.6 The social practices of trading commodities and making contracts is simply presented as a kind of law of nature that kicks in when people live together. In turn, what’s supposed to substantiate these claims is a story about the natural propensity for some people to already be more efficient than others at producing things for the purpose of exchanging them for other things. In short, Smith assumes the institution of contractual commodity exchange (and the pursuit of efficiency that comes with such an institution) that he observes in his time as simply eternal principles of social relations.

It is in relation to explanations like this that we get this really nice quote from Marx:

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life and consequently also his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters…have already acquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher not their historical character (for in his eyes they are immutable) but their meaning.

Adam Smith comes to the phenomenon of division of labor after the fact has already been established. The division of labor as the organizing force in society already appears to him as something natural and established. And instead of seeking to understand how things came to be this way—instead of seeking its historical character—he simply tries to grasp its (current) meaning by eternalizing it. Consequently, his understanding of the forms of social life ends up being incomplete at best, or incorrect at worst (sorry, Mr. Smith!).7

The error here can be explained in different (simpler?) terms. Principles are exceptionless things; if it can be empirically established that something goes against a purported principle, then the purported principle is not a principle at all. To use Smith’s story once again, if it is purported that it is a law of nature that all people everywhere will engage in division of labor for the purpose of commodity production, then any instance in all of history in which people lived differently serves as a counter-example that must be accounted for or else be forced to “regard the institutions of the present as eternal laws of nature which for ‘mysterious’ reasons and in a manner wholly at odds with the principles of a rational science were held to have failed to establish themselves firmly, or indeed at all, in the past.”8

Not only so, but, crucially, erring in this direction also obscures the real nature of the (social) institutions that are responsible for producing the phenomena we’re interested in understanding. The true nature of those institutions is that they are “relations between men” and, as such, they are different in kind from the relations between, say, chemical properties, or matter in an electrical field. The former can be changed; the latter cannot.

To understand this point, one only needs to remember that at one point in time the relation between ruler and ruled was thought to be a divine right of kings, passed on through their blood, and sanctified by God’s will. The social institution of political rule was thus considered by at least some significant portion of the world to be a kind of immutable law of nature despite the fact that, as the American and French Revolutions showed in practice, it was no such thing. No law of nature was invalidated when Louis XIV was beheaded because there was no law of nature that dictated his rule. His execution only showed political rule to be what it has always been: an institution characterized by one social arrangement among many.9

What’s key here—and what tends to be overlooked in the bourgeois way of thinking—is the possibility that the current social institutions in which we find ourselves can be subject to the same mystification. If, for example, one thinks of all of history leading up to the present moment as the story of capitalists-in-embryo coming to liberate the entrepreneurial spirit by fulfilling the economic laws of the market, then one will fail to see that the present moment, too, is constituted by social relations between people. To put it bluntly, it is not a law of nature that there should be such a thing as the owner of the factory, to whom all profits must go; this is just another contingent fact about how the world currently happens to be that can be changed.10

The alternative to committing this error of fossilizing history into a formalism, Lukacs tells us, is to banish “everything meaningful or purposive” from history by sinking into absolute particularism.

What does he mean by this? On the strongest reading, to do this is to simply deny the existence of any systematic principle whatsoever as playing any role in the development of history. In other words, it is to insist on the claim that nothing more can be extrapolated from understanding some event in history that would be of any use in any other circumstance. It is, in a sense, to go back to the mistaken view of history that we discussed in part A wherein history consists of nothing more than the catalog of one event causing the one after it.

That doesn’t mean engaging in history would become a useless endeavor. If you wanted to know why the French Revolution happened, you could, for example, point to the debt taken by the Crown during the American Revolution, the rising cost of domestic grain, the women’s march on Versailles, the storming of the Bastille, the King’s flight from Paris, etc. linking each of these in a causal chain leading to the fall of the Monarchy. And that very well could give you a pretty good understanding of that particular event. However, you would not be able to say anything more than “this is just what happened at this particular time under those circumstances.” You would not be able to generalize to some claim like “peasants who can’t feed themselves or their family tend to get angry—monarch should avoid those situations if they want to keep their heads.”11 Rather, you would have to simply insist on a kind of historical agnosticism in which anything may very well follow from anything independent of what has happened before.

To be sure, this is a consistent position—in fact, it is so consistent that it has been taken up in other areas of philosophy—but, crucially, it does not appear to be a position on which something like a scientific study of history can be built.12 One can, of course, deny that such a project is possible at all, but to do so would be to deny the assumption we accepted in part A that history is social science; i.e., the fight would be somewhere else, not here.

In any case, I think Lukacs is right when he says that in committing this error, history can “only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organization would be aesthetic, as if it were a work of art.” If there really is nothing to history than learning the specific particular order in which things occurred, then, if its only use would be in seeing something like the beauty of various events ordered chronologically. There may in fact be such value, but, once again, it is not the value of scientific rational understanding.13

Okay, let’s take stock because although we’re only a couple of pages into the actual text, we’ve actually covered a ton of Marxist theory.

We started by arguing that a social science of history—a full systematic understanding of why things happen—requires something more than an appeal to individual psychologies. What this “something more” might mean, however, is by no means clear. This posed the “problem” of history. Bourgeois thinkers’ solution to this problem was to find universal principles or laws of nature whose application would lead to the present. In positing such principles, however, they ultimately end up positing that things happened the way they happened because the laws of nature to which we’re all subject to dictated that they should happen this way.14 Not only that, but because the task these bourgeois thinkers set for themselves always starts from the current moment and the principles they establish must result in the present moment, it also turns out that all the laws of nature aim must necessarily aim at the present—thus, it turns out that, for example, all of history aimed at producing capitalism and the nation state!15 How fortunate.

This is a highly deterministic picture; the notion that any one or any group of people could have done things different—the very contingency of history—is dispensed with. As such, all actual differences in social arrangements, anything that speaks to another way if which things could have been should people have acted otherwise must either be ignored or clumsily explained away. Little remains but a dogma affirming the necessity of the present.

Seemingly, this error could be avoided by wholly rejecting the appeals to laws of nature as solving the problem of history. But to do that would be to transform history “into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied best in the ‘spirit of the people’ or in ‘great men.’” In other words, it would be to just say that stuff happens because some people do certain things. But that doesn’t solve the problem. We know that some things happen because certain people do certain things, and we know that at least some of those things happen because those people want or intend for them to happen. But we also recognize that, on the one hand, people’s wills aren’t (fully) determinative of what actually happens, and that, on the other hand, a full explanation would also tell us why people have the kinds of wills that they do (this is just the stuff from part A).

Whereas the appeal to eternal principles presented us with a radically deterministic picture of the world, the denial of such principles presents us with a wildly voluntaristic one. Thus, we seem to be trapped in a dilemma.

In part C, we’ll begin by discussing how Marx is supposed to have resolved this dilemma (spoiler: we already talked about the necessity of understanding social institutions) and cover the topic of fetishism, but since we’ve gone on long enough for now, let’s stop for now.

Intro here; original text here.

1.

A. The Essence of Scientific Marxism

Let’s begin by talking about history and examining this argument from Engels that might appear as odd at first glance. Lukacs tells us that

Engels proceeds from the assumption that although the essence of history consists in the fact that “nothing happens without a conscious purpose or an intended aim,” to understand history it is necessary to go further than this. For on the one hand, “the many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than those intended—often quite the opposite; their motives, therefore, in relation to the total results are likewise of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the further question arises: what driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of actors?”

I’m going to go painfully slow through this argument because I think it set up some important ways about looking at history that might not be immediately obvious if we go quickly. Please bear with me.

The first thing that might strike the reader as odd is the claim that the essence of history consists in the fact that “nothing happens without a conscious purpose or an intended aim.” Strictly speaking, this is obviously an overstatement: rockslides crush cars, monsoons flood villages, fires burn down forests, etc. and none of these events require any appeal to the conscious purpose or intended aim of some agent. In some cases such an appeal may be relevant—as when a fire is started by an arsonist or a rock slide is started by someone pushing a boulder off a cliff—but it is simply false that nothing happens without attributing it to some agent. So, how can it be necessary to “go further than this” to understand history when the “this” in question appears to be a false statement?

The key to seeing what Engels means is to draw our attention to the claim that this is the foundational assumption of history. What does he mean by that?

There is one sense in which we can think of history as the complete catalog of past events. Thus, the history of the world begins with the Big Bang, followed some time later by the formation of the planets as we know them, then by the breakup of Pangea, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and so on, with the latest addition in this catalogue being the events that involve human beings and their domination of the Earth. To do history in this sense is to accurately fill in that catalog of events based on empirical evidence, and to understand history, in turn, is to know the order in which those events occurred. (Because so much of history classes in school focus on memorization of names and dates, I think this is, unfortunately, the impression that many people have of the discipline as well)

Of course, this is not the only way that one can think of history, and, in any case, this is not the sense in which Engels and Marxists in general look at the matter. Rather than thinking of history as a collection of events, Marxists look at history as a social science, meaning that, on the one hand it concerned with the events involving the actions of people or groups of people (that’s the social part of ‘social science’), and, on the other hand, because it is a science, it is a discipline interested in providing correct systemic explanations for those events. This doesn’t mean that events that weren’t done by some person or another don’t factor into historical explanations—after all, historians might very well talk about the Bubonic Plague or the eruption of Krakatoa and their impact on the people around—but such events are not the proper object of history and the fullest explanations for those events can be provided by biologists, epidemiologists, and geologists.

So, if history is primarily concerned with offering scientific explanations for events involving the actions of people, the claim that the foundational assumption of the discipline is that “nothing happens without a conscious purpose or intended aim” makes sense! In essence, the claim here is simply that people do things for reasons and that we understand why things happen by understanding those reasons. On a strong reading, to deny this would be tantamount to saying that the actions of (at least some) people are entirely disconnected from their psychology, which, in turn, is just to say that there is no explanation for what was done. This is indeed a good foundational assumption.

At this point, however, Engels cautions us that we have to go beyond such an assumption if we want to get a full understanding of history. He gives us two reasons to believe this: the first is that history is full of examples in which people do things purposefully or intentionally, but the result of which is something other than what was intended or desired.

This is quite obviously true and follows from the fact that there is no strict one-to-one relationship between what one intends and the state of the world.1 Consequently, it is also not true that for every event that is done by someone or some group of people, that person or persons had the intention to produce that event or state of affairs. Simply put, and to our frequent dismay, the world does not unconditionally bend to our will.

More concrete examples of this sort are also easy to find in everyday life: Michael wants to pay his boss a compliment but makes a faux pas instead, landing him in hot water with HR; Janice intends to get home in time to walk the dog, but traffic keeps her from doing so; and so on and so on. Crucially, if we want to understand why Michael was fired or why Janice’s rug was soiled, we will fail to do so either by assuming that they wanted or intended for those things to happen (quite the opposite—both Michael and Janice wanted something very different to happen!), or by simply stating their actual desires or intentions (yes, I know Janice intended to get home in time and I know that Michael desired to impress his boss—that doesn’t explain why Janice’s living room stinks or why Michael is stress-eating a Big Mac and looking over his resume).

The suppressed argument that Engels is making here, then, is that what’s true about how the will operates on the micro scale also is also true on the macro scale. If we can’t explain the soiled rug by looking in Janice’s head, then we also can’t explain the Terror by looking in Robespierre’s.

Not all people find this to be immediately convincing. For instance, some people still approach history with something like “The Great Man” theory which holds that (at least some) historical events are explained by the thoughts and actions of specific individuals who assert their will on the course of history so as to alter its path. Thus, if we want to explain the Reformation, we have to look at Martin Luther; if we want to explain the American Revolution we have to look at Washington, Adams, and Jefferson; if we want to explain WWII we have to look at Hitler; and so on.

The view isn’t entirely implausible since these figures do factor largely in the events they are meant to explain and its certainly relevant to talk about what they intended or wanted to do with the actions they took. But accepting it in its strongest form does require us to take the figures in question as being rather super-human in their abilities to assert their will.2 In weaker forms, such a view acknowledges the multiplicity of factors that are needed to explain some event or other, but still places a strong (perhaps the strongest) emphasis on the role of the individual and their psychology. What Engels disagrees with, then, is precisely where we place our emphasis—hence, he says that “their motives [of the actors in question], therefore, in relation to the total results are likewise of only secondary importance.” Notice, he doesn’t say that the will of individuals is not important at all, but rather, that in relation to the total results—that is, when it comes to understanding the full picture—the individuals’ psychologies are of secondary importance.

What about the second reason for turning away from individual psychology? Well, given that we’re not discounting desires and intentions entirely, there may very well be some cases in which historical events are to be properly understood by looking at the content of the individual’s will. However, claims Engels, even then, there’s a further question that we can ask: namely, why did this person’s will have this content rather than another?

Take a concrete case. Suppose, for example, that we explain why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 by saying that he had a well documented history of stating that he thought the Slavs were an inferior race, that the Bolsheviks should be wiped off the face of the Earth, that the land they occupy should be used as living space for Germans, and that if it was up to him, Germany should conquer all of Eastern Europe.3 In other words, Hitler invades the Soviet Union because he wanted to and intended to do so (from very early on in his career). Even if all of this takes us quite far in understanding why the invasion happened, we can still ask why he had those intentions and desires. Of course, the psychological buck can be passed—he thought this way because he had certain exposures to certain ideas prior to and during WWI, because he had a certain upbringing, because he got butt-hurt about his paintings, etc. But the question still remains because, on the one hand, it’s not true that everyone who went through similar experiences or who had a similar upbringing ended up having genocidal desires and intentions4, and, on the other hand, it is not true that every person who has such desires and intentions is able to put them into action. God only knows how many people have intended or desired to act on their virulent racist desires without, thankfully, being able to act on them. Individual wills have certain content and degree of effectiveness only under certain conditions and a full explanation requires spelling those conditions out. Or to put the matter another way, there were no Ancient Egyptians who desired to disrupt the Pharaoh’s rule by introducing free market based reforms in financing (sorry Mark Corrigan), and the explanation for why that is the case is not going to be a psychological one.5

Now, why does this matter? It matters because Lukacs tells us that “the essence of scientific Marxism consists, then, in the realization that the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them.” Thus, we know from the start (good God, we’re only two paragraphs in) that the whatever explanation he will give from a Marxist standpoint for what class consciousness will entail will not involve looking at what any given person or people think.

Okay, let’s pause here and return to some discussion of the errors that bourgeois thinkers make in interpreting history next time.

As always, it’s important to note that like the other works I’ve covered in this series, this is not a piece of academic or scholarly work—I’m not consulting the original Hungarian, nor am I reading secondary interpretive sources. Everything that follows is simply intended to use my knowledge of Marxism and philosophy to make sense of a text that might seem intimidating, but which I believe has a ton to offer to leftists. If at least one person feels that they have a firmer grasp on the topic as a result of this, then I’ll feel pretty good.

And finally, although I’ll be summarizing and commenting on the essay, it’s always best to read the original beforehand (or at least read it along) so that you have a sense of what’s going on in the text independently of what I’m saying about it. Thankfully, the good people at Marxists.org provide a free copy of the text which you can find here.2 Let’s get started!

Introduction

The introduction to the essay is brief but important as it lays out the main questions that Lukacs will attempt to answer in the remainder of this essay. As with all such introductions, we can use the questions to not only orient ourselves around the text, but to hold the author accountable to the task they set for themselves.

Before we do that, however, we have to talk about class.

Lukacs says: “In Marxism the division of society into classes is determined by position within the process of production.” Understanding this claim is crucial because the questions that Lukacs will raise about class and class consciousness follow from understanding it, so it’s worth spending some time to unpack it. Please, bear with me.

We can start by noting that ‘class’ is a social category. It is a term concerned with relations between (groups of) people—Adam did not belong to a class (at least not until Eve shows up), and while the last person on Earth may have been part of a class until a certain point in time, once they are alone it makes no more sense to say that they are a part of a class than it does to call them a philanthropist or a socialite. This much is clear. However, while most people will acknowledge that class is a social category, they tend to think of it as one that is constructed on the basis of a loose set of shared individual economic, cultural, and psychological characteristics. Let me explain.

To be working class in this sense is, of course, to be poor—perhaps uncomfortably so. But it is also to speak with a regional accent, to dress in low-quality clothes, to be superstitious or uncritically religious, and, generally, to be uneducated, uncultured, and bigoted. Working class people don’t care for opera, understand the subtle genius of Tarkovsky, or delight in reading Plutarch because of the kind of psychology they have; they drink cheep liquor, eat unhealthy food, curse and spit and are loud and vulgar and sexual because that’s just what they are as individuals. Indeed, it is often these latter (supposed) cultural, psychological, and sociological facts that are employed to explain the poverty associated with the working class. It is because working class people are so psychologically and culturally impoverished that they are therefore unable to restrain their immediate impulses, delay gratification, and save enough money to improve their material condition.

It is this cluster of individual traits, shared by others that binds them to the working class. In turn, even when class is seen as an economic matter, it is seen as downstream from the virtues and vices of its individual members.

The same logic is extended to the upper classes. Apart from their income, it is their cultural, sociological, and psychological virtues that not only allows for, but also makes it right that they should occupy their given space in society. It is middle class’s prudence, self-discipline, respectful appearance, and hard-work that earns them the income necessary to buy a house in the suburbs, take vacations, and buy health insurance.3 Likewise, it is the entrepreneurial risk-taking spirit, pedigreed upbringing, wise investment, and undeterred commitment to excellence of the upper class that secures its members their private jets, luxury yachts, and massive returns on capital gains.

I don’t want to overstate the matter here. There are plenty of people who readily recognize that there are individuals who defy the stereotypes of their class. Everyone knows that there are, for example, working class people who enjoy Tosca as well as ultra-wealthy idlers who do nothing but live off the fat of their inheritance.

Plenty of people will also acknowledge that there are systemic reasons for these anomalies such as unreasonable barriers to entry for certain professional avenues, or exceptionally permissive tax codes that allow the wealthy to hoard. But, on the whole, such exceptions are seen as anomalous precisely to the extent that they are a mismatch between an individual’s traits and talents, and the class to which they belong. The problem seen as such isn’t in the existence of classes, but in their rigidity. The solution to such anomalies, then, is seen as a matter of finding out how to most equitably sort people in the right class based on their traits, and not, for example, to abolish classes all together. Indeed, the very notion of class abolition seems as an absurdity from this perspective because it seems tantamount to abolishing the very concept of categorizing. On this understanding of the term, abolishing class to end economic oppression is tantamount to the suggestion of abolishing race or gender by pretending that there are no phenotypical differences between people—you can try to do that, but people will just find some way of sorting themselves out “naturally” by their differences.

In any case, this is not how class is understood in Marxian terms. Marxists begin their analysis of class not by looking at the traits of individuals which “naturally” lump people into categories, but by looking at society as a whole. Starting there, we can note a couple of things.

First, regardless of its composition, society is something that extends across time and its continuation literally depends on the things that allow it to reproduce itself from one day to the next (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, medicine, transportation, etc.). If society cannot reproduce itself, it will collapse.

Second, the things in question necessary for the reproduction of society don’t come ready-made like manna from heaven, but are always the result of concrete applications of labor in relation to nature—wood must be chopped down, planks must be treated, furniture assembled, crops watered, cloth woven, and so on.

And third, this concrete application of labor is and must always be done by some group of people or other if it is going to be done at all.4 A society in which no labor is done by anyone is a society in which no food is produced, and is also a society that will not be around for very long. Thus, it follows that the (re)production of society always depends on settling the question—through discussion, negotiation, or, most often, through the naked use of violence—of who performs that labor, when, and to what end.

Classes are defined in terms of how those questions are settled.

Consequently, in Marxist terms, the working class is not defined by the culture or psychology of its members, but by the way in which these questions have been settled, and, more specifically, how they have been settled since around the 16th century. The system we call capitalism is just one particular way of settling them.

The working class is that group of people that must labor and which depends on selling its labor power as a commodity in order to survive.5 It must do this for the simple reason that those who make up the working class have no other means of feeding, clothing, and housing themselves, given that they do not own the means by which food, clothing, and shelter are produced.6

They do not own the means necessary to produce these things—the factories, machines, land, etc., or what Marxists call “the means of production”—because, for historical reasons, they are solely in the hands of a different group which, through its control of the state (and the latter’s monopoly on violence),7 also has complete rights to the profits that they may generate. And since this this latter group stands in a different relation to the production process, it forms a different class: we call it the owner class, or, in Marxist terms, the bourgeoisie.

Thus, what places an individual in a particular class is not any individual traits that they possess, nor is it strictly their salary—after all, Mark Zuckerberg only takes a salary of $1 at Meta!8—but rather where they stand in relation to the process of production. If you have to sell your labor power in order to survive, then you’re working class; if you can survive on passive income because you own what society needs for its reproduction, you’re bourgeois.

It goes without saying that much (much!) more can be said about class. I can’t pretend that the two ways I’ve described here are the only ways to think about the matter, and although I’m clearly not impartial about my preference, I also don’t take myself to have given an argument for why one should accept the Marxist version.9 Such arguments exist, but I’m not making them here. Instead my goal has been to illustrate what Lukacs already takes his Marxist audience to assume about class by contrasting it with a version that, even if not ubiquitous, is familiar enough to draw a distinction.

And with all that in mind, we are finally ready to get to Lucaks’ questions about class consciousness.

Given this Marxian use of the term ‘class’, the first question that arises is: “how are we to understand class consciousness (in theory)?” Why is this a relevant question? Well, if ‘consciousness’ is a psychological category that applies to individuals, and ‘class’ in the Marxian sense is neither a psychological category, nor one that applies to individuals, then it’s not clear what '“class consciousness” even means. At best, it may be something obscure; at worst, it might be a kind of category error (something like “rock sexuality” or “horse politics”). Unless it can be shown that class consciousness does not involve some kind of fundamental inconsistency in theory, it is a useless concept.

But this isn’t enough. According to Marxist theory, class consciousness is supposed to be crucial to the waging of class struggle and the bringing about of revolution. That is, it is supposed to have a practical implication for political action. However, it’s not clear how class consciousness as defined is supposed to do this. It’s easy enough to understand how a certain kind of individual consciousness can guide an individual’s actions if we (rightly) believe that there’s a connection between how people think and what they do. However, if it is once again acknowledged that class consciousness is not a psychological category—if it’s not “the thoughts of the class”—then how that consciousness can affect action becomes oblique. Hence, the second question to answer is: “what is the (practical) function of class consciousness, so understood, in the context of class struggle?”

Third, we can ask “is the problem of class consciousness a ‘general’ sociological problem or does it mean one thing for the proletariat and another for every other class to have emerged hitherto?” We can understand this question as follows. Given that classes are defined in relation to their role in the production process, and given that those relations have not always been those of capitalist owner and proletarian worker, it follows that there have also been different classes.10 However, it remains an open question whether class consciousness can be applied to those classes, or whether it only applies to the working class under capitalism. In other words, it remains open whether class consciousness is a concept that can only be uniquely applied to the working class because of specific historical developments, or, as Lukacs puts it, a “‘general’ sociological problem.”11

Finally, we can also ask “is class consciousness homogenous in nature and function or can we discern different gradations and levels in it? And if so, what are the practical implications for the class struggle of the proletariat?” In other words, is it possible for the working class to have a little class consciousness (as a treat), or is it an all-or-nothing thing? Obviously, different strategies follow depending on how this question is answered. If, for example, class consciousness comes in different gradations, and if class consciousness is indeed important to the revolution, then it may be possible to approach the matter incrementally. If, however, class consciousness is an all-or-nothing thing that must be achieved all at once, then incrementalism will not work (or, to the extent that it could work, it would be different in nature).

These are the questions that we’ll be trying to answer in the following sections.

What happened on Tuesday was surprising, though, in retrospect, perhaps it shouldn’t have been. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t expect Trump and the Republicans to win. I thought it was going to be close, but that in the end Harris would barely squeak by with a victory, and I was already preparing myself for the struggle with the liberal order. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. Far from it, the Republican party managed to not only win 312 electoral college votes, but were also able to also secure the popular vote by nearly 4 million votes. Furthermore, it appears as though they will also gain control of the Senate and House and will more than likely be able to extend the existing super-majority they hold in the Supreme Court once Thomas and Breyer retire. In short, this election was a bloodbath for the Democrats.

But why? The proximate cause is that the Democrats simply couldn’t turn out enough people to their side. As of writing, the total number of votes for Harris is 70,980,347 compared to Trump’s 74,708,848, while in 2020, Biden got 81,283,501 votes with Trump receiving 74,223,975. Thus, it appears that Trump’s base remained as large as it had been four years prior, but that the Democrats shed some 11 million voters.1

This may very well be true, but it has the same ring to it as being told that the Yankees lost because the Red Sox scored more points. Cool. A better explanation would, at the very least, tell us why the Democrats were unable to mobilize their base, and a full explanation—at least one that I think would be worth paying attention to—would be able to answer that question while grounding it in a material analysis. I am afraid that I don’t have the skills or knowledge to give this full, grounded explanation, but I want to posit some answers that attempts to go beyond the trivial.

First, I think it’s fair to say that despite the numbers posted above, the Biden administration did not have anything close to a mandate to rule over the last four years. For some significant majority of Donald Trump’s supporters, the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and, for perhaps an equally significant majority on the Democratic side, the Democratic primary was likewise stolen. One can’t forget that going into Super Tuesday, Biden was nowhere near the top choice.

In short, Biden was nobody’s first or preferred choice, but there was a tenuous agreement within the Democratic coalition that despite all the Super-Tuesday fuckery, a democratic presidency would be preferrable to another Trump term. So, people held their noses and voted for Biden on the unstated assumption that a) he would be a one-term president whose term would allow the Democrats to build their bench for 2024, and that b) he would make some attempt to address the issues around the primary (e.g., COVID, healthcare, college debt, immigration policy, minimum wage, Trump’s brazen criminality, etc.)

Over the next four years it became apparent that none of the items of b) would be addressed affectively: COVID relief was stopped; Universal healthcare was off the table despite the continuing pandemic; the minimum wage remained at $7.25; Trump’s immigration policy became the Democrats’ immigration policy; attempts to forgive college debt were stopped by the Supreme Court; Trump’s legal charges weren’t addressed in time. Furthermore, a whole lot of other things that weren’t on the table got much worse: Roe was overturned and there was never any clear plan as to how something like it could be reinstated2; the railroad workers strike was broken; inflation skyrocketed; the war in Ukraine devolved into a meat grinder; Israel began its ethnic cleansing campaign of Gaza; student protests on campus were brutally repressed. At every turn, whether accurately or not, the Biden administration was perceived as either incompetent at handling a crisis (e.g., handling inflation and securing women’s reproductive rights) or unwilling to do anything (e.g., student protests and Gaza).

For each of these problems some limp defense was offered: the COVID relief checks already included the $600 sent out under Trump; college debt relief had to be means-tested; the railroad strike would have ruined Christmas; there really were too many immigrants at the border; inflation was due to disruption in supply-chains; Israel has a right to defend itself; and so on. Whether any of these defenses were justified didn’t matter because none of them made a difference to the fact that most people felt like things were getting worse. It doesn’t matter, for example, if the much touted infrastructure bill helped reduce inflation in such-and-such sector if, at the same time, a box of cereal still costs $10 and every time you look at your phone you see a Palestinian man carrying the remains of his children in a plastic bag.

All this was made worse when it became obvious that he was reneging on the assumed promise of being a one-term, interim president, and doubly worse when it became apparent that he was in severe cognitive decline. After it became obvious that the Democrats would lose if they ran Biden on the ticket they made a further mistake: they didn’t hold a primary in which candidates could have distinguished themselves from the disastrous Biden administration, but instead picked a deeply unpopular member of that very same administration by selecting Harris as the new candidate.

For a moment it looked as though this might work, but I was always struck by how quickly people seemed to forget that a) when Harris ran for President in 2020, she was even more unpopular than Biden, that b) she was mostly known as being incompetent and seemingly drugged out during her tenure, and that c) when she wasn’t shuffled off to do the most unpopular and degrading tasks by he bosses she was d) never thought about at all. This was the position she was brought into and it’s not clear that anything was done to try to correct this broad impression that people had other than, of course, to insist that it simply wasn’t true! More than anything, however, what made Harris’ candidacy abortive from the start was that she was simply never able to separate herself from Biden, for whom she still worked, and whose goals and projects she was associated with. She could neither criticize the policies that made Biden unpopular nor, incredibly, offer any alternatives to them, retroactively, or for the future.

If you were a disaffected Democratic voter who had been disappointed with Biden and for whom it looked as though things were getting worse and worse, the Harris campaign’s message that essentially nothing would fundamentally change could not possibly have been a mobilizing one. There simply was nothing there for you—no positive vision you could conjure to motivate you to vote for the party.3

Instead, such folks were told to imagine how much worse things could get under Trump, and to not-so-subtly insist that everyone, regardless of their politics, material conditions, or values, had a moral obligation to continue the status quo, not because it would be good to do so, but because of what the alternative would be. Such an argument might have worked twice before, but it’s obvious that even it can’t be used indefinitely, and not because it’s false that the alternative would be worse, but because people become inured to abstract fear and pay more attention to their actual, concrete worries.

Worse, the party’s response was not to adjust in response to this fact, but to pivot to catering to moderate Republicans. For the life of me, I can’t understand why the campaign decided that the endorsement of the Cheneys would solve their problems. How many people did they genuinely think there were who wouldn’t have voted for Harris but for the endorsement of one of the most unpopular former congresspersons and her war criminal father, associated with one of the most disastrous Republican administrations in recent memory? Were there as many as ten such people in the country?4

So, going into election night the Democratic Party had run an unpopular candidate, with no positive vision of the future, promising that nothing would change to an electorate who thought things were already going badly. As it turns out, the cost of these mistakes is 11 million voters along with all the things that we were rightly told we should be afraid of with a Trump administration. A job well done.

We will have to live with the consequences of these mistakes for at least two years and perhaps as long as a generation.

That’s my initial diagnosis, but I don’t want to leave you, dear reader, completely depressed. I do think that we’re in a terrible situation, but I want to share the two things about which I’m oddly optimistic.

First, it’s important to remember that we tend to imagine the Trump Republican party as marching in ideological lock-step. I think this is far from the case. I suspect that there are a number of factions within the Republican camp, all of whom are fighting for influence in the new administration, and all of whom are under the whims of the ideology-free Trump. Some will be able to flatter their way to being in his inner circle, but I doubt any given faction will be able to both soothe his ego and get their plans through. The biggest worry we, on the left, should have are those places where the various factions agree (e.g., favoring business, gutting federal regulations, and so on). Even there, it’s important to note that agreement in principle doesn’t necessarily mean agreement about priority, and that, too, will be important for a Trump administration being effective.

Second, although I’m not holding my breath, it is possible for there to be a radical Democratic Party realignment in a more progressive direction. If such a realignment is to occur, I doubt it will be because of some internal soul-searching. Rather, I think it would come from outside—either from having to respond to other left-leaning parties’ pressure, or from a general populist revolt from the Democratic base who is unwilling to compromise with policies of the existing party. In either case, this creates a great opening for leftist agitation and for a revival in working-class politics. As much as I hate to say it, maybe it’s possible that the accelerationists are right about at least some things, and maybe something better will come from this ignoble failure.

In any case, a lot more work will have to be done.

Stay strong, everyone.

One thing about me that surprises of people who don’t know me very well is that I’m a pretty big fan of reality television. Even more surprisingly, perhaps, is the fact that I’m an especially big fan of a subset of reality television in which people compete to “find love”—almost always monogamous, heterosexual, good-looking love with other monogamous, heterosexual, good-looking people—under a series of bizarre, artificial, and non-sensical constraints.1 Shows that fall under this category include ongoing series like Love Island, Love is Blind, and The Ultimatum, as well as VH1 classics like Rock of Love, Flavor of Love, and I Love New York (each of which deserve to be enshrined as cultural landmarks of the 2000s). However, I am most devoted to the Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise.2

The premise of these shows is straightforward: a good-looking man (the Bachelor) or woman (the Bachelorette), is given the opportunity to find love among a group of 20-30 equally attractive and diverse contestants. The contestants try to prove desire and commitment to the Bachelor/ette through feats of strength, humiliation rituals, cross-promotional advertising events, and “cocktail parties.” For their efforts, the Bachelor/ette rewards the ones they like best with roses, and every episode, the contestants who do not receive roses are “eliminated” and forbidden from pursuing their relationship with the Bachelor or Bachelorette further (presumably by the show’s host).3 Eventually, the pool of contestants is narrowed down to a set of four, at which point the Bachelor/ette is required to meet the families of these relative strangers, then to three, where sex between the couples is permitted (only once! And only in the bizarrely named “Fantasy Suites”), and finally, to two, one of whom is chosen in an engagement ceremony. The engagements are rarely successful, but, sometimes, surprisingly, they are. In any case, what happens “after the final rose” is more or less irrelevant.

What I find particularly interesting about this show (and others like it) is not necessarily the highly artificial “search for love” that is presented as authentic and real (I’m not a child, after all—I know that love is rarely on the table), but the fact that despite the fact that I know none of it is real, I still find myself involved in the drama of the show and that, frankly, I enjoy it. There’s some part of me that is engaged in Brechtian distancing from what’s going on and that is constantly reminding me about the number of PAs on set, the lighting and costuming directors, the massive cameras that swoop in on every kiss, and so on, and another part of me that thinks that it was a fool’s move to approach the Bachelorette so aggressively at the cocktail party, or that a contestant’s parents truly don’t understand how love can blossom between two strangers. As such, I find myself very much like the wrestling fan who, despite knowing that all the fights are choreographed and all the conflict is artificial, still yells at the TV when the latest baby-face makes a heel turn.

And, indeed, for a long time I thought that the key to understanding reality television was a principle that is originally found in wrestling: kayfabe. Kayfabe, briefly put, is the practice in professional wrestling of presenting what is clearly staged as real, both on and off the stage. It involves engaging in a kind of bald-faced lie in which both the audience and the entertainers involved know that what is presented is staged, but in which the entertainers vehemently deny that it is. There is nothing malicious in this kind of lie, and, according to at least some people, “keeping” kayfabe allows the audience to more easily experience emotion.

But I’m not sure that that is the case. It is true that breaking kayfabe during a wrestling match would indeed decrease the intensity of the emotions experienced by the crowd, but this much is true for virtually every kind of entertainment that involves some shared pretense. If, for example, Christian Bale turned to the camera, broke the fourth wall, and said “by the way, I’m not really Batman” then it would be pretty difficult to get invested in what happens to him when he’s face to face with the Joker. But we don’t need Christian Bale to insist that he really is Batman when he goes on the Today Show, and his promotion of the film doesn’t detract from the experience of watching the film. Likewise, I venture to guess that it is only a very, very small minority whose experience in watching the film is ruined by being reminded that Bale isn’t really Batman after the film is over. Yet, when kayfabe is discussed, the assumption seems to be that when it comes to wrestling, acknowledging that these are people portraying characters put in highly artificial situations would somehow detract from the enjoyment. I don’t think this is the case and I’d be very sad to learn that someone’s experience in watching The Rock deliver the People’s Elbow against Hulk Hogan4 was ruined by being reminded that the two probably don’t hate each other and are just working together in a televised athletic production.

The same is true, I think, for reality television. In fact, it’s easy to show that maintaining kayfabe isn’t necessary for enjoyment because “Bachelor in Paradise” exists. For the uninitiated, this part of the Bachelor franchise completely does away with the pretense of the main series and just puts all the attractive people from past seasons on a beach together to couple up, drink, and have as much sex as they want to. The very same contestants who only two months ago were head-over-heels with the Bachelor or Bachelorette, who shed countless tears at their rejection, and who couldn’t have imagined a life without “their person” are seemingly doing perfectly fine and never even as much as mention any of the events that supposedly had such a profound and transformative experience on their lives. This would seem strange but if not for the fact that everyone—audience and contestants alike—are aware of the fact that the events of the main show are not meant to carry over into this show, and that what happened there wasn’t really real.

This is not to deny that there is quite a bit of kayfabe in these shows—after all, even in Paradise, nobody explicitly says “yeah, that was all for television” and they generally try to stay away from the fact that the franchise as a whole is primarily used as a way of generating Instagram followings. But I am skeptical that this shared practice of kayfabe is what makes the show engaging.

In any case, all this is to say that the role of kayfabe has been overstated as the key to understanding what’s entertaining about (this kind of) reality television. Instead, I want to suggest that what does is kayfabe’s familiar cousin: improvisation. In improvisation, actors are given a particular character to play in a particular setting and they do their best to produce believable (often humorous, but not necessarily), representations of their characters without a script. Both the audience and the players are explicitly aware that the situation that is being simulated is not reality, but, depending on the skills of the actors and the willingness of the audience, both are able to suspend that belief and experience what’s happening in the scene with genuine emotion.5

That much of this shared with reality television is obvious enough. However, what makes reality television different from standard improvisation is the fact that the contestants in reality television aren’t given their characters by either the audience or the producers, but are chosen by the contestants themselves. In some cases, the characters in question end up being stock characters—the bad-boy, the virgin, the manipulator, etc.—but in most cases, people play the character of themselves-in-the-situation-they’re-presented-with. Thus, when real person Michael M. meets the Bachelorette for the first time, he isn’t told “make sure when you meet her you act like a really self-centered bastard,” nor does he go into the situation as the actual Michael M. meeting some strange woman. Rather, he enters the situation as Michael-M-who-is-supposed-to-be-falling-in-love-with-whatever-woman-he-meets-outside-the-limo. Let’s call this character Michael*.

Michael M. and Michael* are not the same person, nor is Michael* necessarily an accurate and factual representation of what Michael M. would be like in the given situation. This becomes obvious when we consider a more extreme example. Suppose, for instance, that we told Michael M. that he was going to be in a simulated bank robbery and encouraged him to act in the same way that he thinks he would if he were really being robbed. In filming that, we see Michael M. behaving as he thinks he would behave were he being robbed. But behaving in that way may be very different from the way he would behave if he were really robbed. In the former case, he might act defiant, bold, and fearless; in the latter, he might be anxious, timid, and cowardly. Of course, there might be some overlap between how he would actually behave and how he thinks he would behave, but it would be naive to think that there is a one-to-one mapping between performance and reality. In the same sense, when we put Michael M. in the context of having to fall in love, what we’re seeing is really Michael M.’s own interpretation of what he thinks he acts like when he falls in love (or what he would look like if he were).

This doubling effect in which a real person plays a character of themselves is, I believe, the most interesting thing about reality television because it does two things. First, like other kinds of acting and improvisation, it can be entertaining depending on how skilled the players involved are at reading and adding to the scene that they find themselves participating in. Not everyone is good at improvisation, but when they are, it makes for good television because we can delight in the craft.

Second, because the characters on display are characters of real people played by the very same person being portrayed, it’s easy to blur the line between the character and the actor in a way that kayfabe attempts to do, but in which it can only do through a denial of the split between actor and character. With reality television, this denial isn’t necessary, but not because what is being presented is reality, but because the character is modeled on and performed by the actor. This, too, can be a source of delight.6

And third, and most interesting, I believe, is the fact that this kind of doubling can tell us something about how we, the audience, and society more broadly, understand the specific phenomenon in question. The thought is something like this: because the contestants on these shows are trying to play believable characters, they will often act in ways that they think the audience will understand. Thus, men who have to pretend to be in love will often play characters as jealous and possessive or ultra-competitive with other men because that’s how they think most people understand being in love. This is true regardless of whether that is how they actually act when they are in love (as mentioned, they may not even know how they act in such situations). Once we realize this, we are able to create the critical space to enjoy the work, but to also understand that we are part of a society in which these behaviors make sense (or don’t!). From there, we can take a critical stance towards these factors themselves (why, for example, does it ‘make sense’ that every contestant mention how important it is that the Bachelor/ette is close to his or her parents? Never in my life have I thought it important that a potential romantic partner of mine be close to her mom—it’s fine if they are, but like…who cares!?)

Okay, so, how should you watch reality television? The answer is already patently clear. If you don’t already like reality television, but find yourself having to watch it for whatever reason, my (unsurprising) recommendation is that you start thinking of the show (whatever it might be) as one long improvisational acting exercise and evaluate it as such. Are the characters convincing being made up convincing? Are they working with everything they have at their disposal? Can the actors read the scene? Do they know how to elevate the action? Are they able to follow the set rules of the scene while subverting them? And so on. You can also start paying attention to the kind of characters that are being presented and why they contestants (and producers) are choosing to present themselves in such a way. What does it tell us about us that they are doing this? Chances are that if you already like reality television you do this to some extent, but if not, maybe this can add a bit to your enjoyment.

Epilogue

A striking thing about “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is that, if not read carefully, it’s very easy to miss its political undertones until the the very end. Indeed, the first time I read the piece, it seemed to me that the explicitly political matters addressed in this final section were just clumsily pasted from an entirely different essay. It felt as though Benjamin had been tasked with writing a political article but had only remembered to do so a few minutes before he submitted it to his editor. After all, isn’t the epilogue of an essay meant to be a kind of recapitulation of the central arguments of the essay? But how could that be the case if there has been no word of Fascism or Communism until now? And what does Fascism have to do with photography? How do we go from considering the effects on an actor performing around a camera to a critique of imperialism?

These are natural questions to ask, and I think it’s quite normal to feel a kind of whiplash in moving from the main text to the epilogue. One of my goals in writing this series has been to minimize this effect as much as possible for you, dear reader, by stressing that the political aims of the essay run deeply and are, indeed, crucial to understanding the very substance essay. The essay is not only an essay on art, but is also an essay on politics and the future of politics as it appeared in 1936. Furthermore, it is not a neutral analysis of politics, starting from some “common-sense,” ahistorical observations about the present, but is a decisively partisan leftist analysis. What makes the essay fit for the Socialist Reading Series is not the singular mention of Communism in its final sentence, but rather Benjamin’s commitment to providing a historical materialist, Marxist analysis of the phenomenon in question.

But let’s turn to the text. In broad terms, what we are presented in the epilogue are two ways in which the mechanized reproduction of art, and the underlying material processes that explain it, could be harnessed by two diametrically opposite political movements. In terms of socialization, it is a question of what our relationship towards art is going to be, and whether we will be socialized in the Fascist or Communist way. Most of the emphasis is on the Fascist attempt to do so, but the Communist vision is in the offing, and I’ll attempt to spell it out more thoroughly as we go along.

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but at least one way to understand Fascism is as a response to the very same underlying material conditions of advanced capitalism that Communism responds to, with the crucial differences between the two being a) the analysis offered those conditions, and b) the political projects pursued in light of that analysis. Whereas Communists root their analysis in the internal contradictions of the capitalist system by way of class analysis and present their solutions in terms of international revolution that overthrows those conditions and dispenses with class altogether, Fascists root their ahistorical analysis in terms of a weakening of the national spirit (or blood, or race, or values), and present their solution in terms of a national strengthening and/or purification that reifies the existing class structure. The same dichotomy can be presented as one side offering a scientific, demystified analysis which seeks liberation of the masses through a progressive restructuring of the social relations, and the other side as offering a thoroughly mystified, aestheticized and reactionary project which seeks to preserve the existing social relations.1

Turning back to the text, we can see the line of argument that has been developed throughout the essay and the conclusion of which is spelled out here along the following lines. Mechanically reproduced art coincides with the emergence of the proletarianized masses—both are a product of the changes in industrial production that accompany a mature capitalist form of production. The very form in which this mechanically produced art appears is shaped by the conditions under which it is produced, and, in turn, speaks to the general social conditions of its production. And because the art is made for the masses, in anticipation of their reaction and their consumption of it, it holds the potential of informing and habituating the masses towards the pursuit of their collective liberation. Nevertheless, this process is not a deterministic one, nor is it one that exists in a vacuum. Neither the fact that we can map out its trajectory, nor the fact that we can ground this mapping in a historically materialist idiom guarantees that the process described will succeed in achieving its end goal. Indeed, in the context of class warfare there is a considerable effort—both conscious and unconscious—to blunt, dismantle, and divert the inchoate revolutionary energy of the masses away from a restructuring of social relations and towards something else. This is the role of Fascism.2 One of the means by which it attempts to do so, as Benjamin points out, is by drawing the masses away from the material understanding of the world—an understanding that makes them aware of their right to change social relations—and towards an environment in which the masses are free to express themselves insofar as they do not make any fundamental changes to existing property relations.

What’s crucial here is, of course, what expression means in the Fascist context. It’s clear that whatever else he might mean by the term, Benjamin thinks of expression as, in the first place, a diversionary measure that channels revolutionary energy away from understanding the world, and, in the second place, as a measure that preserves the existing social relations. It is easy to come up with contemporary examples of this phenomenon in the US: painting a “Black Lives Matter” mural with one hand, while staunchly opposing any defunding of military and police budget with the other; putting up “In this house we believe…” signs with one hand while preventing any affordable housing measures; claiming to be the most progressive president since FDR while actively supporting a genocide in Palestine and repressing student protests with police violence; and so on.3 This is also the stuff of modern day culture wars.

But I don’t want to step too far out of Benjamin’s particular context—Benjamin was not writing about the modern Democratic Party, but about capital ‘F’ Fascism in Germany. And, crucially, he sees the mark of that political system as culminating in the cult of the Fuhrer—the singular mythical leader who embodies the will and aspirations of all the German people and to whom the entire Volk must submit—and the ways in which the production of art is “pressed into the production of ritual values.” Thus, it seems that Benjamin’s focus is more on how art, with its historical ability to mystify is being used to not only buttress political figures and policies, but to imbue them with the same kind of authority that it carries. Thinks, for example, of the cultic value of the swastika, of the ritualistic context in which Hitler delivers his speeches, of the pagan pageantry of the Nazi parades, of the Hugo Boss designed SS uniforms, and so on. This is the aestheticization of politics of which Benjamin is speaking.

The efforts of this aestheticization leads, according to Benjamin, to a single place: the pursuit of war.

War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.

Why should this be the case though? I believe the answer is to be found in the ways in which I described the difference between Fascists and Communists above. For the Fascist, there can be no internal restructuring that does not at the same time aim at internal purification. That process, however, is not one that can mobilize the masses while preserving existing property relations. At best, what it can do is mobilize some part of the masses against a different part of the masses—viz., that part that is impure, corrupting, degenerate, etc.—and this presents only a part of the full force of the economic machinery that capitalism commands. The (national) masses can, however, be mobilized against others who can, in turn, be seen as the source of the internal, national corruption (whether they take form in the Globalist Jewish Cabal, the International Bolshevik Conspiracy, Anti-Christian Secularism, the Great Replacement, Islamic Terrorism, Cultural Marxism, or whatever garbage they right manage to dredge up).

We know that, for example, the mobilization of the war-time economy during WWII was of paramount importance to the rise in American dominance through the remainder of the 20th century. And likewise, those of us lucky enough to remember 9/11 and the War on Terror know that there’s nothing like a military adventure to unite the country as it battles its mysterious cultic enemies.4 It is in these attempts that the aesthetics of war can be brought in to smooth over the internal contradictions inherent in the existing property relations, and to externalize the revolutionary energy built up from those contradictions towards something other than their resolution.

Benjamin illustrates the drive towards war that comes from the aestheticization of politics by citing (one of) the Futurist manifesto(s).

The aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production—in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

Here, Benjamin offers us a variation of the well-known Marxist “fettering” thesis that explains social change. Roughly put, that thesis states that when social relations arrest (or stop, or frustrate, or fetter) productive forces, those relations are overthrown so that the development of those productive forces can continue. Social relations between people don’t change because there are new ideas that take shape in the minds of select individuals and spread to other, like-minded individuals, until, at some point enough hearts and minds are changed to do things a new way. Rather, such social relations change because the productive forces in society require them to be changed. Accordingly, slavery in the United States was not abolished because enough people came to be convinced of the moral wrong of owning human beings—something people had known for hundreds of years anyway—but because the social relations that constituted slavery fettered the productive forces of capitalism. It was the productive power of “free labor,” which capitalism requires for its development and which constitutes an entirely different set of social relations between producers and appropriators of labor that brought it into conflict with slavery, not the conscience of the good Northerners.

Benjamin provides a slight (but significant) modification of that thesis. He claims that when the productive forces of society (here put in terms of increases of technology, speed, and energy) are frustrated, rather than putting immediate pressure on the underlying social relations and revolutionizing them, they will spill over into the pursuit of war where they can be put to use and continue to be developed. And in the meantime, this process will be mystified and supported through its aestheticization.

We can think of the picture provided here as a kind of pneumatic model. Thus, we can imagine the productive forces as a raging river, blocked by the dam of existing social relations which prevent it from flowing. Given enough time and pressure, the sheer force of the water as it crashes against the damn walls will break them, but until that happens, the water will stagnate. If, however, we start to dig tributaries away from the pooled water, then it can continue to flow while the dam remains in place. The pursuit of and engagement of war represents the process of digging those tributaries.

Benjamin thinks that this diversion—this channeling away from the social relations that are at the root cause of the productive slow-down and which denies the masses’ right to change them—is a sign that society has not yet become master of itself. That is, rather than utilizing and mastering the technological and productive forces that it develops for itself, society still behaves as a tool of those forces.5 Rather than taking the productive forces developed by industrialization and shattering the social relations which deliver the fruit of those forces into the hands of the few at the expense of the many, it caters to those forces so that the social relations can be preserved.

Crucially, the preservation of these social relations is a political phenomenon. It represents a political position in which human beings are made subservient to the productive forces around them unto death. And in this profound state of self-alienation, the solace that is offered to the masses is that this death can, at the very least, be a beautiful one. This is the promise of Fascism: you will die for the idea, the glory of the nation, the future of the race, the destiny of the volk—but it will be as mystical and beautiful of an experience as possible.

Communism responds by showing that this promised beauty is yet another illusion. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Parting Thoughts

It’s hard to believe that I actually made it to the end of this project. When I started it nearly a year ago I thought it was going to be a nice way to get the Socialist Reading Series going again and to get some second-hand use out of the lecture notes I had written for my aesthetics class. At most, I thought that this would be two or three short entries. A year later, it turns out I’ve written something like 30,000 words and about 50 single-spaced pages on a single essay. To those of you who have stuck with this, thank you! I don’t know how many of the views on here are actually from bots and how many represent real people, but there have been a few folks who have told me that they’ve kept up with this series and I’m always deeply touched (and equally surprised) to hear it. This was not a piece of academic work—I did no research on different interpretations, no close exegesis of the original German, and consulted no secondary literature on the matter. This was simply was my attempt to give an easy-to-understand explanation of a text that might not appear as such on a first reading. If there’s even one undergraduate student who uses this to better understand this essay in class, then I’ll be satisfied. I would be even happier if someone who is simply curious about the essay reads this in its entirety and finds something worth thinking about.

As I’ve mentioned multiple times before, I really like this essay, so I won’t repeat all the things I think it does well. However, I do want to briefly mention the big criticism that still bothers me, and which more than likely popped into your head as well while reading this. In particular, I think it’s quite natural to read Benjamin and think to oneself something along the lines of “wow, this guy had no idea what movies would become” or “man, Benjamin is really optimistic about what film can do.” More pointedly, one might look at the sheer amount of garbage produced by Hollywood and wonder why anyone would have thought that something like, for example, Paul Blart: Mall Cop or Movie 43 would hold revolutionary potential. Not only does there seem to be a glut of stupid films, but there also seems to be just as many mainstream reactionary pieces of media floating around—from overt propaganda films like Charlie Wilson’s War to the thousands of superhero movies which continually reinforce the idea of political resistance as individual exceptionalism (within the bounds of a rigidly maintained economic system).6 How could this kind of cinema be liberatory? Or is it only something from the Criterion collection that can do the job?

There’s just something about the essay that very likely to strike the contemporary reader as quaint or naive in Benjamin’s analysis in light of what we know about movies today.

Indeed, it might be tempting to defend Benjamin as someone who was trying to make sense of a new phenomenon to the best of his abilities at a time when film was still very young. Perhaps if he had known what we know now, he wouldn’t have been so optimistic, but given that there was no way to guess how intertwined film would become in our everyday lives, and to what different ends mechanically reproduced art would be put, he was simply doing his best.

I don’t think this is a good response for two reasons. First, it seems to relegate Benjamin’s analysis to the status of a historical curiosity, much like some silly treatise on medicine from the middle ages, or a 20th century speculation about what life in the year 2024 would be like—that is, as something interesting, but fundamentally mistaken. I think if this is all that Benjamin has to offer us, then he’s probably not worth taking seriously. Second, this response seems to imply that Benjamin simply couldn’t imagine that there would be an increase in the quantity of films produced—and hence, why he just couldn’t know how much garbage could be produced—or a diversity in the content of those films—and hence, why he couldn’t imagine films being used for reactionary purposes. But both of those implications strike me as absurd. As we’ve seen, time and time again, one of the hallmarks of mechanically reproduced art that Benjamin draws our attention to is the massive increase in the volume at which it can be produced and consumed. He stresses this point over and over throughout the essay, so it would be rather odd to think that he would have thought of film as being exempt from the very same trait that he readily acknowledges applies to photography. At the same time, it’s also not true that he wouldn’t be aware that films could have reactionary content. After all, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will had been released in 1935, the year before Benjamin finished his essay. As an avid art critic it seems to me virtually impossible that he wouldn’t have been aware of the film, but it seems even more improbable that he would have been entirely ignorant of the use of Nazi propaganda films in general.7

While the claim that Benjamin was writing at a time when film didn’t have the status and function it serves now is technically correct, this doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. In fact, I’m more inclined to think that differences in the technologies of film production and perhaps even the shift in distribution models after the advent of streaming services would have a bigger impact on his analysis than anything else.

And this takes me to what I think is the real problem with the analysis: it presents too tight of a relation between mechanically reproduced art’s form and the viewer’s psychology such that the former is meant to have a profound impact on the latter.

Let me explain. Recall that one of the central themes of the essay is that mechanically reproduced art has a way of presenting reality by cutting it up and restitching it in different physical and temporal contexts. We can see the actor on a beach in one scene, cut to a scene of a car driving down the highway, then cut to the same actor in an office and none of what is displayed has to have be shot in that particular order, or even in the particular places it purports to have happened (after all, a beach can be simulated on a soundstage as well as in LA). It is precisely this ability of mechanically reproduced art that is responsible for finally destroying the aura of art that other media exhibit, and which, in turn, is supposed to make experts of the masses who engage with it. Note that in this description, nothing is said about the content of what is presented in the film. The same things could be said about a movie regardless of whether it was about how industrial dog food is made, a dramatization of the Paris Commune, or one of Leni Riefenstahl’s films. As such, and to return to a previous point for a second, it’s not the case that Benjamin was unaware that different movies could have different content, but rather that the content simply wouldn’t be important to whether or not the effect he describes would take place.

As I interpret him, Benjamin holds something like the claim that in the absence of countervailing forces which mystify and obscure (i.e., the Fascist aestheticization), the mere representation of any subject devoid of aura would tend to naturally push the masses to want to understand it as it really is. This, in turn, is to be explained by the modern desire to bring things closer to us so that we can understand them (see section III). Consequently, if, at a later time, we find that the masses haven’t developed the desire to understand reality as it is, then it seems as though this must be because we have not understood those countervailing forces which have robbed film of its liberatory power. And, indeed, one (perhaps uncharitable) way in which the Frankfurt School’s work can be understood after Benjamin is as undertaking this project of figuring out how the development of culture prevented the proletarian revolution.8

In any case, what undergirds this picture is a very specific view of human psychology that I have very little reason to think is correct. This is not to say that I have some idea of what the correct account of human psychology is, but the one that seems to be presented here appears to me to be much too shallow. To put the matter another way, it seems to me that the desire to bring things closer to us and understand them that is supposed to be a background constant in the present day may not be as prevalent as Benjamin takes it to be. Here, perhaps, I lean a bit more Nietzschean—I think our psychologies are as much directed towards helping us cope in ways that let us continue to live and to will as they are towards truth and understanding (perhaps more broadly, I also think that our own explanations of our psychologies are suspect, and doubly so when we paint them as rooted in something noble or admirable). I can just as well see how our psychology could be undergirded by a desire to push things away and to forget them as much as it could be by a desire to bring them closer to us. Now, perhaps this desire to forget and push away, to mystify and ignore, is strictly the result of the countervailing reactionary forces that seek to divert our energies towards anything other than the source of our problems. And perhaps in the absence of such forces, we really would be driven by a desire to understand the world as it is (after all, I also strongly believe that, for example, racism presents such a force and that it is important to remove racism so that we can see the world as it is). But this is a further position that needs an argument and not something that can be taken as a starting point.

Having said all that, I want to stress that I don’t mean to imply that Benjamin presents the future of Marxism or leftism as resting in the proverbial hands of film or photography. That is, it’s not as though he believes that the role of mechanically reproduced art is to liberate us, and that it is the only or even primary means by which we will become liberated. At times it’s easy to read him as saying something like this, and if I’ve given the impression that he says this, I want to correct that now. The revolution will neither be televised, nor will it be made by film. We will not be liberated by the culture we consume and nothing about Benjamin’s essay should be read as an endorsement of that absurd (though surprisingly popular) idea.9 Rather, if he’s right, then I think we can better understand art so that even if it cannot liberate us, it cannot be used to aestheticize our politics and lead us to our demise willingly. This is perhaps a rather narrow and largely inoculative measure, but it is one that might make a significant difference.

Apart from that, it is still the Communists’ economic theory, their praxis, and their guns that offer the best means of liberating the people. But that’s a matter for a different reading series.

Section XIV

Art does not merely cater to existing desires. Rather, it aims beyond them to create new demands which cannot yet be met by the current technical means under which it is produced.

Two things follow from this claim. The first is that art (true art, one might want to add) always speaks to something ideal beyond its time, but which, at any given moment, it is prevented from fully reaching or expressing because of the material and technological fetters that bind it. In other words, art always attempts to jump over its own shadow in the abstract, but is never able to do so in the concrete at the moment it takes that leap. The realization of its desires comes only later.

The second thing that follows is that a full and accurate description of an art from in the present moment—whenever that might be—will reveal not only the aspirations of its predecessor made manifest, but will also indicate what it aspires to next. This allows us to not only use an analysis of art in the present moment to read history backwards, but also to better understand the horizons of possibility that may become reality in the future.

We can see that this is the case, claims Benjamin, if we take a closer look at Dadaism which “attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in film.”

How so? We can see Dadaists (unconsciously) attempting to express some ideal beyond their time through the fact that they did not care too much about the market value of their works. Dada collages, paintings, and poems were not primarily meant to be sold at auction (although they might have been), but, claims Benjamin, were rather intended to produce an effect in their audience: namely, outrage resulting from the deliberate destruction of the artistic aura. Here, the choice of media—ready-made, mass-produced, quickly degrading, everyday articles, jumbled together in a visual or literary collage—was itself an important part of producing this effect. How could you think that art had a special, magical aura if it was entirely made with the same cigarettes you smoked this morning, taped to the newspaper you reads every day, and plastered with the same plastic buttons you’re wearing on your jacket? There simply cannot be any mystification before such works in the same way that one could easily believe there being before a Michelangelo, or a Vermeer.1

Not only so, but the very same jumbled mess also makes it impossible to contemplate the elements presented. What is there to contemplate about the familiar and unremarkable? There is no “master’s touch” required to write a name on a urinal, no unique vision reflected by the artist’s hand. Instead, there is just stuff—ordinary, everyday stuff—and lots of it. Indeed, one is tempted to say that in Dadaist art—at least as Benjamin describes it—one is directly presented with a raw, material reality that short-circuits and overwhelms the expectations of the audience. And, of course, the result of this overwhelming is outrage by the viewer.

Crucially, however, this initial outrage is eventually transformed into a new desire in the public which is only realized fully in film. Before we can specify the content of this desire, it’s important to notice that Benjamin is elaborating on a previously mentioned point with this illustration: namely, with Dadaism, we can see the very same reactionary attitude towards art, transformed into the progressive attitude of that same public towards film. What was avant garde and outrageous previously, is now greeted with eager approval.

We already know part of the answer as to why this desire forms from our discussion of Section XII: namely, it is the result of a technological shift which allows for a certain quantitative accumulation which results in a qualitative shift in the public. We also know that this shift is marked by the new ability to appreciate what is presented as an expert. And it is this expert enjoyment, I believe, that is critical to fully understanding the formation of the desire. To see something as an expert is to see it as it is—experts are not mystified or duped by appearances but are more closely aligned to the truth of the matter than non-experts. Now, if we recall that the aura associated with art is a form of mystification, and that in Benjamin’s view film presents us with objects that have no aura (because it is able to represent them as they are and as we know them to be), and does so in such a rapid succession that it becomes impossible to contemplate them, then we can see the desire that the public comes to have for film as the desire for truth and freedom from mystification.

Putting all this together, we can also understand the content of the desire. Strictly speaking, the content of the desire is a desire for that which Dada aimed to do when it attempted to jump over its own shadow. And if we fill in the details appropriately, we can see that this is a desire to be free from mystification and to have a true understanding of the world as it is.

At the risk of repeating myself excessively, this shows us, once again, the radical optimism with which Benjamin viewed the new medium of film. If my reading above is correct, then we can more easily understand how he could consider it as a means of social liberation. Manually reproduced art mystified us, creating a space between the true understanding of the world and its representation through the aura; mechanically reproduced art destroys the aura, frees us from mystification, and eliminates the space between apparent and true understanding; we, the public, become aware of this demystification process on the public level, and demand more and more of the new art which gave us the truth; in turn, we come to better understand the world and our place in it, ultimately drawing us into political action.

Or not! More on this last point in the epilogue.

Section XV

In the final section we are confronted with a potential objection: is it not possible that the very metamorphosis that we have described here is something regrettable? Why shouldn’t the fact that the masses now desire active, unreflective participation in the arts give us reason to worry? Does this not signal a dumbing-down of the arts, a kind of Nietzschean victory of the everyman?

Benjamin refers to Georges Duhamel’s criticism of film along these lines. For Duhamel, film is

a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries…a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence…which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.

Duhamel’s criticism might strike us as absurd if only because it is virtually impossible to meet a single person who does not enjoy some movie or other. Indeed, if you were to find someone who refused to see any movies whatsoever, you’d be safer concluding that they were completely deprived of all culture rather than that they aristocratic in their preferences.

Still, his criticism may not sound so strange if we adapt it to, say, television. It is still quite common to find people who hold that although film requires serious artistic engagement, watching television does not.2 Such people do insist that television is a distraction for people who cannot think and who only watch it to live vicariously through the characters on screen. As Benjamin reminds us, “this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.”

Still, it is worth looking at Benjamin’s response to the criticism raised, not only because it is an incredibly original and interesting one, but also because it might very well help us understand how to respond to our modern version of the same criticism.

Benjamin does a curious thing by drawing our attention to architecture. Why? Because architecture is, in the first place, an art form, but more importantly, it is an art form that is most commonly interacted with and absorbed by the distracted masses.

Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction…Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art.

The point is clear: art forms absorbed by the masses have always been with us, and if we want to see what they can offer us, we should analyze how we relate to them.3

So, how do we relate to buildings? We do so “in a twofold manner: by use and by perception - or rather, by touch and sight.” We can, of course, look at the building before us, observe its stained glass windows, elaborate stone work, and the arrangement of its apses, cupolas, and buttresses.4 Contemplation is not out of the question here. But it is not necessarily, or even usually, the way in which we engage with buildings. Usually, we engage with a building by the way we use it, or, to use Benjamin’s term, through a tactile modality. We do this not by running our hands over the interior walls of the building as we might run our eyes over its various architectural features, but by moving through it.

What follows is a very important passage that must be unpacked:

Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical perception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

One does not learn how to move through a building, where to find the bathrooms, which rooms are for public use and which ones are private, by observing and contemplating the building. We learn how to do this by growing up going into many different buildings and forming various physical and psychological habits. I know automatically, for example, that if I enter a public building, there will be a bathroom on each floor of that building. Indeed, so ubiquitous is the need for public buildings to have bathrooms that the inclusion of such rooms obtains, to use Benjamin’s term, canonical value. We simply don’t make buildings without bathrooms.

Clearly, the inclusion of bathrooms in buildings does not obtain its canonical status because we looked at buildings and decided through contemplation that they should have bathrooms. Rather, it is our lived experience, our formed habit with our most shameful of bodily functions (I kid, I kid) that leads us to making the inclusion of bathrooms canonical.5 The same is true for things like windows that face the outside at eye level, door frames that are tall enough for the average person to go through, and so on.6

To stress, what matters here is the habit, formed by lived experience. Crucially, for Benjamin “the distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that the solution has become a matter of habit.” Again, it is not our careful attention to the building that leads us to the bathroom of the museum, but our habituation to living in a certain way. And our ability to form such habits without consciously attending to them that shows that the building does what it’s supposed to do. Why does this matter? Because if this is correct, then the fact that one is distracted when engaging with a particular form of art makes little difference to one’s ability to master some truth or set of truths contained or reflected by the art form.

If the argument from the critic is that film (or television) cannot provide us with any connection with the truth because its audience is distracted and not contemplating it, then it seems that architecture is a counter-example. People are in touch with the truth, even if distracted, because their habits provide them with that connection and their habits are shaped by the art. And, of course, what’s true for architecture may be true for other “distracted” art forms, too.

Naturally, then, the question arises as to what kind of habits we are encouraged to adopt with this new art form. This will be the final topic picked up for the epilogue (and final entry of this series). However, before we leave this section, I want to take note of something that Benjamin says in its closing sentences which will sharpen the reason for addressing this final topic:

Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film…The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examine, but an absent-minded one.

What we see here is, I believe, Benjamin’s nodding towards the notion that there may be an advantage towards bypassing the cognitive, contemplative, individualistic ways of engaging with art and embracing the “distracted” way of tackling tasks. As individuals, we are reluctant to understand the world we live in, our social condition, and the necessity of working together to achieve the greater good. With film, however, and more broadly, with the distracted mass absorption of art, we can circumvent this difficulty and form mass habits that would leave us better off (in terms of our relation to the truth anyway).

Dear reader, before you bristle at this suggestion, just remember that we do this all the time already. It is the process of socialization and social life would be impossible without it. Thus, the question isn’t whether we should form habits or not—whether we should be socialized or not—but which habits we should form and how we should be socialized.

It is this question, once again, that takes us to the epilogue.

Section XII

This is a terribly difficult section in my opinion, so apologies in advance for getting into the weeds. We can begin by reminding ourselves of the repeated Marxian theme that has been playing in the background throughout the entire essay: quantitative accumulations lead to qualitative changes.1

Benjamin now tells us that one of the qualitative changes that result from the quantitative accumulation of mechanically reproduced art is “the reaction of the masses” towards art itself: “The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie.”

Now, in all probability, the example Benjamin uses to illustrate his point would have been much more useful for an audience closer to the time period in which he was writing, or to people for whom Picasso and Chaplin conjure up something concrete. Unfortunately, as I am neither a Chaplin nor a Picasso expert, the example is rather lost on me, and, I imagine, may be lost on others in a similar position. Nevertheless, we can note three things relying only on common knowledge in order to move on: first, we can confidently say that both Picasso and Chaplin are here treated as emblems of new art (cubism and cinema respectively), second, that each involves a different medium (painting and film), and third, that each supposedly elicits a diametrically opposed response in the masses (regressive in the former, progressive in the latter).2 We are supposed to take note of the shift from the former attitude to the latter.3

If this is right, then the qualitative change in question is precisely this: the change of the masses’ response to novelty from one of disapproval and reaction in one medium, to one of approval and progression in the other. This is the claim that Benjamin will be offering an explanation for in the remainder of the section (it remains to be seen whether it is accurate and whether the explanation is any good).

Now, according to Benjamin, the progressive reaction that is notable in the masses today is “characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.” Although phrased somewhat ambiguously, it’s clear that the fusion in question is between, on the one hand, the visual and emotional enjoyment involved in engaging with an art piece or medium, and, the orientation of the expert on the other. Thus, the natural reading of this claim is that whereas previously, people had been able to engage with (visual) art for its visual and emotional pleasures, the masses, to whatever extent they participated in such engagements all, did not do so as experts.

This reading is consistent with Benjamin’s comments in section X where he explains that one of the effects that mechanically reproduced art has on its audience is to turn them into experts on the subject matter to which they’re exposed. In short, mass mechanical reproduction of art (quantitative accumulation) leads to the creation of an audience of experts (a qualitative change), which is then able to engage with new art forms as experts, and thus, in a way not previously seen.

This is what his claim is, but, nevertheless, it’s unclear why it’s supposed to be accurate. Some notable ambiguities remain that I don’t know how to resolve. For example, it’s unclear to me the addition of expertise should produce a progressive attitude in the masses rather than a reactionary one. It certainly doesn’t follow analytically that the addition to an expert orientation to some attitude transforms it into a progressive one. This is true even if we strip away the political valance of the terms “progressive” and “reactionary” and simply treat them as general positive or negative modifiers. Empirically, I also don’t know if it really is true that someone (the masses in general?) who becomes an expert in some domain is therefore more accepting towards novelty in that domain that someone who isn’t. In fact, it seems just as likely to me that an expert would be more reluctant to be progressive than a non-expert, if only because novelty tends to shake the confidence that the expert has built up in the categories they employ. What seems to me to be true is that the expert’s engagement with the art form is deeper and more fine-grained than the non-expert, and that, as a result they might have a more sophisticated appreciation of the art form, but that hardly translates to any progressive attitude. So, I’m a bit confused as to why Benjamin feels so confident in presenting his analysis in this way.

Let’s set that aside for a moment. Benjamin continues with another puzzling passage:

Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide.

Why Benjamin thought to use a phrase such as “the greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form” is beyond me, but, parsing it, it appears to be saying that there is an inverse relationship between how novel a particular art form is and how critical the public is in engaging with it. This reading seems to be confirmed by the sentence that follows it. Indeed, one might be inclined to treat the entire passage as confirming a common-sense observation: people tend to enjoy listening to pop music because it is conventional, but approach “noise” music with a critical aversion. But that can’t be right given the text since what matters isn’t the novelty of the art form in question but its social significance. These are two very different things. Something can be novel and yet socially insignificant and something can be very socially significant and completely conventional.4 So, what are we to make of this passage?

The way out of this puzzle, I believe, is to emphasize the very first sentence in the quoted passage: it is the fusion of enjoyment-qua-expert that is socially significant, and, it is mechanically reproduced art (film, in this case) that is for the first time in history capable of producing that fusion. Recalling our discussion in section X, film shows us the conventional (everyday scenes of ordinary people, reflected back at us as they really appear) in an entirely new way (by means of fragmenting, editing, and stitching back together celluloid frames). In this sense, then, it appears that in watching a film there really is a complete overlap between the two attitudes.

But we’re not quite out of the woods yet because Benjamin next tells us that “the decisive reason for this [the overlap] is that the individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce.” What are we to make of this claim?

The important part of this passage is the part about ‘predetermination’ and, hence, the causal direction of affect. We might reasonably think that in order to state the attitudes of any group, we would look at the attitudes of each of the individuals that comprise that group: because I like pizza, you like pizza, she likes pizza, etc., our group’s attitude towards pizza is pro pizza. This is reasonable, but Benjamin tells us that in the case of mass reproduced art, this order is reversed: the masses’ reaction pre-determines the individual’s reaction—the individual’s attitude towards the art takes the form it does because the masses are supposed to have a specific attitude.

But why should this be the case? Consider, again, that films (and mechanically produced art pieces) are products, meant to be seen and purchased by groups of people. To put it another way, film assumes and aims at delivering its message to the masses as a constitutive part of how it is created.5 One can, of course, make a film that it intended for a single person or a small group, but the vast majority of movies that one might see were explicitly made for an audience—usually, for as wide of an audience as possible—with an eye towards producing certain affects in that audience. The reaction that any given individual is supposed to have to what is presented, then, follows from the audience that the film was made.

A horror movie, for example, is made with the aim of producing fear and anxiety in the viewers in general. It doesn’t not approach its task by considering in isolation the various things that some individual or other might find frightening, but with what the majority of people would.6 If the film is a successful horror film, the reactions of the individual will follow, will be predetermined by the intended effect on the audience. And, of course, what goes for horror goes for every other genre.

Key to understanding this point is the contrast with other, non-mechanically reproduced art forms, and, in particular, painting. Paintings are, in general, made for individual consumption (i.e., commissioned for some noble or dignitary), and the reaction they’re meant to produce is either tailored for that individual, or is determined by the reaction that person has. That the portrait of Henry VIII might not inspire admiration in us matters very little if it pleases Henry.

This is not to say that paintings aren’t exhibited publicly or that they’re always a solitary affair. After all, there are such things as art museums and traveling exhibitions, and it’s also true that religious paintings were presented to members of the religious community. But those paintings are exhibited are not, as a rule, made for the exhibition to the masses, but as mentioned, for specific people, or, in the case of religious art, for select groups under the guidance of religious authority.7 Crucially, to the extent that non-mechanically reproduced paintings are seen by large groups simultaneously is severely limited when compared to film. Although the number of people who come to see the Mona Lisa every day is quite significant, it pales in comparison to the number of people who can see the same film.8 Simply put, non-mechanically reproduced art cannot reproduce the “collective experience” that film can.

In broad summary: with the introduction of mechanical introduction in art, we see art being made for the masses and experienced collectively by the masses, and for those reasons, we see the masses themselves change their attitude towards art. “Thus, the same public which responds in a progressive manner towards a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.” Why do they respond progressively towards the film? Because their critical faculties are fused with their capacity of visual and emotional enjoyment by virtue of the film medium itself, and because they experience it as part of the masses, both factors that fall out of its mechanical nature. By contrast, why are the masses bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealist paintings? Because the medium in question “activates” only their critical attitude, because such paintings are not made for the masses, and because it is not possible to experience such paintings as part of the masses.

Section XIII

This section is, thankfully, much simpler, though, I think, equally as important in understanding Benjamin’s main argument. Its main focus is primarily on the potential that film holds in understanding our environment.

Drawing an analogy to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Benjamin argues that film, too, allows us to notice things that would have been unnoticed previously, but which speak to profound underlying social currents. Crucially, because of its mechanical nature, film allows us to notice the minutiae of our daily lives in ways that were previously impossible (or, rather, if possible, then only through extraordinary effort).

Here’s Benjamin, once again, perhaps overly optimistic in his assessment, describing the medium’s potential:

By close-ups of things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals an entirely new structural formation of the subject.

In another repetition of a theme we’ve seen before, we are introduced to film as a new way of representing space and time. Prior to the invention of the camera, insists Benjamin, the world appeared as fixed and course grained. Here is the factory in which you work. It operates as a fixed entity, complete, permanent, and unchanging—it is a place where work happens, but not a place that can be changed by human agency. Observed from the outside as a totality, it appears as a buzzing monolith in which raw goods go in and finished products come out. The introduction of the camera, however, allows us to take a finer grained look into its operations. Instead of seeing the busy shopfloor of metalworking tools and lathes, we can now zoom in on the specific actions of one individual worker; we can zoom in on their hand movements, the mechanical parts of the machine, the concentration on the worker’s face, and so on. Each of these miniscule movements or expressions can be isolated and blown up to the size of the screen, so that the worker’s hands now appear as big as the factory itself, or slowed down so that what appeared too quick to pay attention to before can be the subject of analysis.

Crucially, as Benjamin tells us, this is not simply a matter of increased fidelity. In other words, the difference here is not the one between, say, a VHS copy of Robocop and the Blu-Ray edition of the same film. Rather, it is closer to the difference between seeing the leaf of a tree as you hold it in your hand and the same leaf as it appears under a powerful microscope. The microscopic image of the leaf is not just a “crisper” version of the same leaf that you were holding—indeed, if you weren’t already familiar with microscopy you might not even realize that you’re looking at a leaf at all!—but is an entirely different and much more sophisticated representation of the underlying structures of that leaf. Thus, by using the microscope one comes to understand the leaf, and, in turn, the world, better that one does when looking at it with the naked eye.9

Returning briefly to the Freudian analogy with which we started, the technique of analysis of slips of the tongue does not give us a clearer version of what is being said, but rather serves to uncover the subconscious forces operating on the speaker that lead them to produce what, once again, was clearly understand. For example, an analysis of Ronald Reagan’s “facts are stupid things” slip of the tongue doesn’t make the meaning of that sentence clearer (how could it?)—rather it points to an unresolved psychic tension that lead to him saying that.10

The truly revolutionary potential of film, then, is that it allows for the potential to uncover those underlying structures of our quotidian life that we may have been completely oblivious to simply because they passed too quickly or were too subtle. Or, to put it another way, the introduction of mechanically reproduced art opens up entirely new domains of scientific understanding by providing us with the means to take up new units of analysis.

Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

As in other places, this allows to see just how optimistic Benjamin is about the potential of film. Far from being simply a new entertainment medium, mechanically reproduced art not only frees us from the previous mysticism which manually produced art (in the hands of the elite classes) wrapped itself in, but also, democratizes it, turns the masses into little scientists, and gives them the means with which to practice their new democratic science. This point will be stressed in the closing paragraphs of the essay, but it’s worth pointing out here because we can see how everything in the essay has been building towards helping us understand this claim.

Having gotten this far, it is also, of course, easy to see why the loss of the aura is certainly not something lamentable for Benjamin. He would no more lament the loss of the aura than a doctor would lament the loss of the humors theory of illness.11

Section X

In the previous section, we focused on the the transformed, and alienated performance of the actor before the camera. This section begins by drawing our attention to the fact that what is produced as a result of such a performance is, from the very beginning, something put before the public. And, crucially, a public of “consumers who constitute the market” before whom the actor has little to no influence. Whether, for example, the film they’re in will be a success or a failure becomes something that is not necessarily a function of their performance, but on how “market forces” play out.1 As such, the actor’s performance ends up much like any other factory produced commodity.

Benjamin then makes some suggestive, but rather under-developed remarks about how this might explain the rise of “the cult of the movie star” and the accompanying anxiety that Pirandello discusses elsewhere.2 I won’t discuss them in details here because Benjamin quickly turns to a much more important matter: the way in which the publicity of mechanically reproduced art changes the public itself.

The first thing to note is that Benjamin believes that film turns “everyone who witnesses its accomplishments [into] somewhat of an expert.” This, recall, simply builds on his previously established claim that film allows people to become critics by virtue of the mediating role played by the camera. Just like people who watch sports quickly grow to feel like they have some expertise in the matter, so, too, claims Benjamin, people watching films quickly grow to think of themselves as experts in what is presented.

It’s worth pausing here to assess this claim because, in one sense, it might seem rather implausible. After all, nobody claims to be an expert in archeology or fighting Nazis after watching Indian Jones, or to have mastered street racing after finishing The Fast and the Furious. However, from a different perspective, it’s clear that Benjamin is absolutely correct. Consider, for example, the well-known phenomenon in which the audience criticizes a character in a horror movie for doing things that it, the audience, wouldn’t do. “Don’t go in there!” or “Why would you split up?!” are criticisms raised from the position of expertise—we know that splitting up makes it easier for you to get picked off by the murderer, and we take ourselves to have learned that information from previous experiences with the genre. Likewise, we tend to immerse ourselves in the world of the film and to analyze and critique the choices characters make within that world’s rules. How many forum posts have been made about the mistakes the Jedi Council made in light of the rising threat of Palpatine in the Galactic Senate? While people might not claim expertise in something like archeology after watching Indiana Jones, they do (implicitly or otherwise) claim expertise in intergalactic politics, lightsaber techniques, and podracing tactics, none of which, mind you, are even real things in which one can have expertise.

More generally speaking, I believe Benjamin is drawing our attention to the fact that we tend to identify closely with the characters and situations in film, and to critically think through the choices and decisions that the characters make in those situations.3 Just as everyone who watches football frequently, sooner or later comes to dabble in some Monday-morning quarterbacking, so, too, anyone who watches movies frequently also tends to dabble in the same activity.

But this raises a natural question: is this not just a general phenomenon in art? After all, is it not true that we also empathize with Hamlet, think through his predicament, and come to criticize him for his indecisiveness, his melancholy, his cruelty towards Ophelia, and so on? Do we not picture ourselves in Achilles’ sandals, furious in his tent over the insult delivered by Agamemnon? In other words, do we not take ourselves to become experts in anything in which we take sufficient interest? The answer is that, of course, we do experience the same effect in other forms of art. The introduction of film doesn’t present an entirely new way of engaging with art, but rather, signifies both a qualitative and quantitative change in that very engagement. Let’s consider both briefly.

On the qualitative side, film shows its audience that every person can be a subject of art (in Benjamin’s words “…the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might find himself part of a work of art…”). This is a qualitative change from the past because it was simply not true that everyone could be the subject of a portrait or the main character of a play. Recall, the manual production of art is mediated through the artist’s hand. In other words, there is no circumstance in which an artist “accidentally” paints a passer by in a scene, and it is safe to say that everyone who is depicted in a painting was placed there by the artist in its final form. But, quite clearly, one can be captured accidentally, anonymously, in a film or a photograph. Indeed, while not everyone can claim to have had been painted, there are very few people alive today who have never been photographed or filmed at least once. It’s worth pointing out here that nothing in this discussion hangs on the fact that, on the one hand, a painter can, quite obviously paint anonymous people on purpose—one doesn’t need to be especially important to be the subject of a painting, though, historically, it seems, this helped. Similarly, and on the other hand, nothing hangs on the fact that there are many directors and photographers who take excruciating pains to depict all and only those people they specifically want to depict, precisely in the way they want to depict them.4 The point, rather, is that it becomes much easier, and much more commonplace to be depicted as a subject in film and photos, and that this is precisely because of its mechanically reproducible nature.

At the same time, this also speaks to the quantitative change: it is by virtue of the sheer number of photographs, magazine spreads, collages, family albums, newsreels, etc. that one comes to understand that they, too, can “find [themself] part of a work of art.” As always, the quantitative and qualitative are dialectically aligned in Benjamin’s analysis: a qualitative change in the production of art leads to a quantitative change in that production, which, in turn, leads to a qualitative change in the social relation between people and art (have I mentioned how admirable Benjamin is as a Marxist analyst?)

Benjamin illustrates his point by pointing to a similar situation with the proliferation of literature following the proliferation of the printing press. Here, I’ll provide a longer quote than normal because I really like how succinct his summary is:

With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing.

In other words, as more and more people engaged with a new means of writing (which was spurred by a new technological change in the reproduction of writing itself) more and more people became writers. They could come to see and think of themselves as writers, and, crucially, to become writers because of this quantitative-cum-qualitative change in engaging with literature.5

What Benjamin says next is especially interesting:

Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship.

This is a very important point in Benjamin’s argument: just as the change in how we came to engage with literature broke down the hierarchical barrier between author and reader, so the change in how we engage with visual art will break down the hierarchical barrier between artist and viewer. We can picture how before the advent of popular writing and literacy (aided by the technological innovation of the printing press), there was a clear divide between those who have the power and means to write, and those who only have the power to receive or consume that writing. The monks write, we read (or, more likely, we listen to someone read). As the masses become literate that division cannot be sustained—what distinguishes a reader from a writer is simply whether they are writing or reading at some specific time (this is what Benjamin means when he says that the difference becomes merely functional). And just as I could come to write about my experience as, for example, a former graduate student and student of philosophy—surely an extremely specialized work process—so, too, in the age of mechanical reproduction, I can also come to make visual art about it.

I think the dual phenomena of reality television and “going viral” illustrate this point beautifully and show how Benjamin’s analysis has been proven astute in ways he could have hardly imagined. The very premise of reality television is that it can take “ordinary” people as they are, and make them into subjects of art by putting them in specific situations and selectively presenting their “genuine” responses. The same is true for people who “go viral.” Here, even more so than reality TV, we can see how the average person, with some luck, some intuition, and perhaps some talent, can rise through the ranks of stardom and fame simply through creating “content” which pleases the masses (and, indirectly, the market). This is only possible because of the dialectical relationship between the quantitative changes in production which lead to the qualitative changes in consumption.

If there’s a single reason to read Benjamin today, it is to understand this precise dynamic.

Section XI

This section, I admit, is a difficult one for me to place in relation to the others. This is, in part, because it appears to repeat much of what has already been said before. Yet, as I hope I’ve shown before, the times in which Benjamin repeats himself usually add something to the previous claims he has made. I suspect this is the case here as well.

We begin by noting that the production of a film is something spectacular in the sense that it involves a whole lot of machines, lights, equipment, and people, none of which are actually seen in the final product. Indeed, the bare minimum expected of a film-maker is that those elements never bleed into what the audience sees—a boom mic shadow in a shot or a PA walking in the background is the mark of incompetence. As such, the making of a film is the production of an illusion and the suppressing of the means by which the final product is made. In that respect, the production of a film is very much like the production of any other fetishized commodity. When I look at my phone I don’t see the thousands of people who were instrumental in bringing this product to me. If they appear to me at all, they appears as unwanted or unexpected intrusions into my fantasy—a thumbprint on the pristine screen, a smudge of cooling paste on the case, an etched note asking for help, etc. To see the traces of the production in a commodity is to see the commodity as defiled, and vice versa. In both film and ordinary commodities, we must see the final product as having arrived ready-made and complete, lest we start to think seriously about what it means to have such commodities in our lives.6

Benjamin then brings up a rather difficult analogy. The question which he wants to answer with this analogy is this: “How does the cameraman compare with the painter?” He responds:

The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sic person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but a little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short , in contrast to the magician—who is still hidden in the medical practitioner—the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

What is Benjamin talking about here?

The first thing to remember is that the two figures are not on equal standing. The magician is not someone who can actually heal—or rather, the extent to which they are able to heal is precisely the extent to which they are lucky—but they are someone who are seen as having the authority to heal. The surgeon, by contrast, can actually do some healing—they can get to the bottom of an illness through their understanding of the body and its inner workings—and it is precisely that understanding which gives them the authority to do their work. If the painter corresponds to the magician and the film-maker corresponds to the surgeon (as they clearly are), then it’s clear that the distinction in their actual abilities and their relation to their understanding of reality as it really is must be carried over.7

Next comes the question of “facing” and “penetrating.” I admit, I struggle with these terms and how they should be understood in this context. Here’s my best attempt: to “face the patient man to man” is to see the patient as a integrated whole, complete and finished. The painter faces their subject in this way—they paint the other as one complete thing (even if, presumably, they only paint a fragment of them). To penetrate into a subject, by contrast, is to seem that subject as being comprised of other things. The surgeon doesn’t have to think about the entire body of their patient, let alone their patient as an entire subject. Rather, they have to think about these particular blood vessels that are obstructed, this particular incision, this particular muscle group, and so on. In that sense, they are not dealing with a complete human being and do not face their patient “man to man”, but deal only with a collection of systems that they must understand and manipulate (carefully!) if they are to succeed at their task.

With these pieces in place, then, we can get a sense of how the analogy is supposed to work: the painter engages in and treats their subject as a whole—whether that be a landscape, a person, a scene at a factory, etc.—and presents it to the viewer as such; the cameraperson treats their subject as a collection of separate fragments which are re-assembled as a whole after they have penetrated to their essence.8 What matters between the two pictures presented, I believe, is the fact that one is more firmly rooted in the truth whereas the other is purely dealing with appearances.9

If this reading is correct, then we can see just how optimistic Benjamin is about the role that film and photographs can play in revealing the truth. Crucially, given that film and photography are, by their nature, products for the masses, we can also see how and why Benjamin thinks that the age of mechanical reproduction can be liberatory. Simply put, the most optimistic summary of Benjamin’s thesis so far is that the age of mechanical reproduction will (necessarily) result in a mass demystification, which, in turn, will lay bare the political realities of the world and usher in a revolution.

We, with our knowledge of how things actually developed, may look upon this as utopian, or perhaps even naive. Film did nothing of the type and, in fact, it could be argued that the mechanical and digital ages of reproduction have done more to repress our understanding of reality than any aura-imbued piece of art. But it’s worth remembering that we only feel this way because of our position in the flow of history—it is not a foreclosed question that things should have turned out as they did, nor is it clear why Benjamin was wrong here.10 If we truly think that he is wrong in his prediction (as I do), then it warrants a serious explanation for why that should have been the case.

On the whole, this year has been pretty terrible. In January, the day before my birthday, I fainted at a coffee shop and fell on my face, breaking my nose, two front teeth, and splitting my lip. When I got to the emergency room, my blood pressure was something like 60/40 which, apparently, is not great. Thankfully, I didn’t have any brain damage and the outpouring of support (both financial and moral) helped me recover through a nose surgery and about three months of dental work. A year later, my teeth and lip still feel off and my nose will always be just a little crooked now, but it’s nothing that interferes with my day-to-day life. My goal for this next birthday is to stay out of the emergency room.

That spring semester was my last one teaching and my last one in philosophy. As I’ve written about before, this has been a difficult transition. On the one hand, I loved teaching and had spent the last decade structuring my life around the hope that I would be doing philosophy in some form or fashion. On the other hand, it’s fair to say that my time in the doctoral program was a six year exercise in disillusionment. Put simply, academic philosophy did not turn out to be what I thought it was. Surely, party of this disillusionment is due to my own inability to meet the standards of the profession—I certainly don’t think I’m immune to rationalization. But I also think that a much bigger part of it has been getting much more interested in politics and into reading the kinds of texts that aren’t taken seriously in analytic circles (i.e., books on the history of politics, economics, psychology, etc.). From that perspective, the narrow, abstract, hair-splitting, cottage-industries of analytic philosophy slowly began to look like a useless (and often reactionary) enterprise.

In any case, my time in the academy was over in May, which started a four-month period of unemployment. My previous assumption that PhD’s don’t just end up dead in a ditch somewhere was seriously challenged: I submitted something like 100 applications for every possible job that I could and received zero phone calls during those four months. Simply put, I was too “overqualified” for entry-level jobs, and too “underqualified” for anything above entry-level jobs. Cool! I was two weeks from my unemployment insurance running out and seriously considering going back to school for another master’s in an unrelated field when I finally landed a job (I landed it through networking, not through sending out applications—let that be a lesson to whoever needs it). This four-month period was brutal. I severely underestimated the psychological toll of being unemployed and just how much of my own sense of well-being was tied in working towards something. Thankfully, this chapter is over and I’m working a job that I enjoy and which is significantly better paid than anything I would have had chasing positions in philosophy.

Finally—and I know how absurd this sounds coming from my privileged position—but the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza has been on my mind constantly every day for the last two and a half months. Indeed, whatever final vestiges of respect I had for professional philosophers since leaving have been swept away since October 7th. The incredible degree of cynicism, indifference, and reactionary rhetoric coming from people who think about politics and ethics for a living, and the embarrassingly bad arguments they’ve advanced to carry water for a regime engaged in an ethnic cleansing has made me glad I’m no longer around (to be fair, I’m sure others are glad I’m not around as well). One of the reasons I haven’t been writing is because the only thing I want to write about is this specific issue and I’m very aware that criticizing philosophers for their hypocrisy is just about the most useless thing I could be doing in light of the material conditions on the ground. Maybe one day I’ll put out the drafts of things I wrote, but that time isn’t now.

My hope for next year is to get back to finally finish this series on Benjamin, to work out some ideas I’ve been kicking around, and to put my thoughts on paper about some of the movies I’ve loved this year (I just saw Eyes Wide Shut for the first time! What a movie!).

To the people who still open up these emails from me, thank you so much! I love you all (except for the ones I don’t)

Until next year:

Section VIII

We’re turning our attention to the stage for this section in order to highlight some differences between theater and cinema. The first such difference is that of presentation: when watching a play, the audience is presented with a person—an actor or many actors—whom they can see right there on the stage. By contrast, when watching a film, we see what the camera presents to us. In other words, the camera mediates or stands between the performance and the audience.

The first consequence of this mediation is that the camera is not bound to show things in the same way that one might see them on the stage. More specifically, it need not present the performance “as an integral whole.” Consider this: when watching, say, Hamlet, on stage, we are presented with a continuous flow of action. The night-watchmen enter the stage together and are seen all at once (along with the background, setting, etc.). The point of view from the audience watching this scene is from their seat and they see everything on the stage as an integrated whole. The ghost of Old King Hamlet appears before them as part of this totality and when the scene is over, the actors leave the stage and others take their place in one continuous move.

This changes when the camera mediates between the audience and the performance. We can, of course, shoot the same scene flat and from far enough away to see the whole stage. More commonly, though, what we observe now is a specific slice, carved up from the camera’s point of view and dictated by its movements. If they so wish, the cameraperson can guide the camera around the performance which allows them to, for example, zoom in to get a close up, swoop above the action, or provide a worm’s eye-view of what’s happening. And, of course, there is, no need to present everything in one continuous take—the cameraperson can shoot several different snippets from different angles, focusing on different things, and then have the editor string those together in post-production for a coherent narrative. In other words, the ‘whole’ that is produced by the final edit is a composition of various bits that are put together. Thus, the actor’s performance is subjected to what Benjamin calls “a series of optical tests.”

A second immediate consequence of this mediation is that the film actor cannot adjust their performance to the audience as they’re performing. On stage, the actor can, for example, wait out the audience’s laughter after an especially funny line so as to let them delight in the moment, or, alternatively, they can rush through a joke that hasn’t landed. This isn’t true in the case of film (or at least not nearly as true or not usually true) since, normally, there is no audience before the film actor and hence no audience to play-off.

The net effect of both of these consequences is that the camera creates a distance between the performance and the audience. This distance allows “the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor” and, in turn, allows the audience to identify with the camera rather than the actor.

What does Benjamin mean by this claim? Quite clearly, when he says that “the audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera” he doesn’t mean that the audience thinks of themselves as a camera. Rather, he must mean that the audience treats what they are shown by the camera as what they would see themselves—the camera’s eye becomes a surrogate for their own. So much is obvious.

Still, there’s something puzzling about what Benjamin says here that I can’t quite figure out: namely, he says that the audience doesn’t identify with the actor but with the camera. If we grant that the identification with the camera is one of surrogacy, then it seems highly unlikely that that’s the same relation that the audience is supposed to have with the actor on the stage. To put it bluntly, when watching a play one doesn’t identify with Hamlet by treating him as though they are seeing what Hamlet sees from his point of view. It is, of course, true that the audience does see what Hamlet sees (e.g., Polonius stabbed through the curtain, Gertrude sitting next to Claudius, the play within a play, etc.), but this is so because the audience sees everything that is on stage—including Hamlet. At no point, however, do they embody Hamlet or any of the characters on the stage. In other words, every member of the audience retains their very own identity during the stage performance. (Note: this is still compatible with the previous claim that they do take on the identity of the camera in film.)

Another possibility is that during a stage performance the audience really does identify with the actor(s) on stage in a more robust way. After all, we might very well feel as though we are experiencing Hamlet’s ambivalence, his frustration at seeing Claudius on the throne, his grief over the death of his father, and so on. This does certainly happen, but it seems to me that it happens just as often in film as it does on the stage. One can have this kind of identification just as well with Michael Corleone as one can with Ophelia, so the claim that something different is happening in film that doesn’t happen in theater doesn’t hold from the other direction.

Frankly, I’m not sure how to resolve the puzzle of what Benjamin means by the phrase we’ve been discussing. I still think the best gloss is the one that appeals to surrogacy (i.e., the audience identifies with the camera because the camera serves as their mechanical surrogate eye), and that this is possible precisely because of the mediating role the camera plays in the mechanical (re)production of film. However, I’m at a loss as to how to understand the initial identification with the actor.

In any case and regardless of how we understand the relation of identification, what seems to be especially important here is the claim that the mechanical means of reproduction creates a certain kind of distance between the viewer and the performer, and that this distance allows the viewer to enter the position of critic. Benjamin doesn’t tell us precisely what taking this position entails, but he does tell us that “this is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.”1 Recall that the realm of the cultic values is that of mystification, magic, and metaphysics—it speaks to a world that is beyond the control and influence of the ordinary and operates on the grounds of certain presumed authority that is not shared with the viewer. By contrast, to take a critical stance towards something is to take it as an object of inquiry, as something that can be unpacked, understood, analyzed, and evaluated. Criticism2 seeks to demystify and investigate what it takes into its scope, and, as such, the critical stance is simply ill-suited to the presentation of cultic values. That makes sense: it’s much harder to mystify someone who is hell-bent on understanding what is put before them than someone who is not.

Thus, we once again see how Benjamin is building up his argument: in this case, the very means by which film is made and, hence, presented, turns the audience into critics.

Now, given that theme of this section has been the comparison between theater and film, I think it’s natural to ask whether Benjamin is implying that the audience is unable to take the critical stance in a live performance or that people who watch films must become critics. I don’t think he’s saying either of those things. It seems quite possible that one could, on the one hand, take a critical stance towards live theater and, on the other hand, fail to take that stance when watching film. After all, theater critics exist, and I personally know a few people who have never taken the critical stance while watching films. The relation between the way one observes a performance and the critical stance is not one of strong necessity. Rather, I think the way to interpret Benjamin here (and elsewhere) is as saying that the mechanical reproduction involved in film makes it easier for the viewer to take this stance because it naturally guides them to take it. As such, it opens up new avenues to engaging with the performance that would not have been (as) readily available to the viewer previously. Likewise, we might reason, the fact that a live theatrical performance still has an aura (after all, to see a live version of Hamlet is to see that specific performance, at that specific time, in that specific place, involving this specific cast), makes it harder to take on the role of the critic.

Thus, what the shift to mechanical reproduction provides us with is a horizon of new possibilities rather than a necessary means of engaging with art. This will become clearer as we get near the end.

Section IX

The main task of the film actor, claims Benjamin, is to present themselves—whoever they might happen to be playing—before the camera. Thus, the film actor is not simply or merely pretending to be someone else, but rather, and crucially, they are pretending to be someone else for the camera. Stage acting involves performing for people; film acting involves performing for an instrument.

We have already been made partially aware of this fact in the previous section where Benjamin drew our attention to the fact that a film actor cannot adjust their performance to an audience, and that the reason they couldn’t do that was, obviously, because there generally is no audience present. However, his initial observation here is not simply a restatement of this previous claim and it’s worth noting why. The difference rests in this. One can easily imagine an situation in a scene is filmed in front of a live studio audience and in which the actors on stage can respond to the audience’s reactions. Indeed, from the audience’s perspective, one can also treat the given scene being shot as something that may as well have been performed on a stage as a theatrical production.3 Nevertheless, whether this is the case—whether there is, to put it loosely, a successful connection between performer and audience—doesn’t matter unless the scene works for the camera, and shoots and re-shoots are done until that standard is met. In other words, what matters isn’t the success of the actor in front of the audience, but rather their success in front of the machine that records their actions; a scene that doesn’t look good on camera is worthless, regardless of how successful it was before the studio audience.

Thus, we see how the very role of the actor is transformed by the introduction of the camera. Not only has the audience been changed from spectator to critic, but the actors themselves have changed from people who perform for people to people who perform for machines. This, understandably, is an alienating transformation: “for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it.”4

This, in turn, is important to note not only because it once again brings us awareness of the aura of a performance (or lack thereof), but also because it signifies that the actor now does something different (i.e., they act for the camera rather than the audience) and that what they produce is different. An actor on a stage performs with their “whole living person” and their performance retains its aura; an actor before a camera might very well make the same physical motions, but, by definition, their performance always and necessarily lacks an aura. This, recall, is not the case with mechanical reproductions of paintings; a mechanical reproduction of the Mona Lisa also lacks an aura, but the original of which it is a copy retains its authenticity. In other words, it’s not as if there is some “authentic” version out there of Bill Pullman giving the speech from Independence Day, of which we see an inauthentic, aura-less copy when we watch the film. Rather, that very performances is and always was intended to be performed for the camera and was always going to be aura-less. Crucially, by drawing attention to this fact, Benjamin allows us to see how the introduction of a new technology alters, in the first place, how art is made, and in the second place, how this change in production changes art itself.

Let’s return to the aura for a second and remind ourselves of something we’ve touched on previously. As mentioned, the actor’s transformation from someone who acts for an audience and whose performance has an aura, to someone who acts for the camera and whose performance necessarily lacks an aura is an alienating phenomenon. This is because, broadly speaking, shooting film turns the actor into an instrument or “a stage prop, chosen for its characteristics and…inserted at the proper place.” Quite separately from their performance lacking an aura, the film actor’s performance is also often broken up in time around the material needs of the production, only to be stitched back together in editing. Thus, there need not be any internal coherence to any given performance. One part of a scene can be shot on Monday and another on Friday; the ending of the film can be shot first with the opening scenes being filmed months later. This fragmentary nature of film is, of course, well-known, and especially so by us in the 21st century who have never known a time before film. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s point is shown to be a much more subtle one than might appear at first glance by the closing sentence of the section. Thus, it’s worth slowing down just a bit to unpack what precisely that point is.

As we have seen, the primary focus of the last few sections has been to contrast acting on stage—a recognized art form—with acting for film. To act on stage is to have an aura, to embody a character, and to present that character’s actions and thoughts in the very order that the audience sees them; to act in front of a camera is to lack an aura and for one’s performance to be split up into as many sections as is necessary, in any order that is necessary. At this point, it is tempting to think that by drawing this distinction Benjamin is implying that there’s something wrong in how acting has changed. This is also enforced by the fact that I’ve presented this as a shift towards alienation. The parallel between the alienated nature of the actor whose formerly unified work has now been split up into a jumble of disconnected movements and the alienated nature of the factory worker who faces the same crisis in a different setting is apparent. However, it’s of absolute importance to remember that for Benjamin, the loss of the aura is not itself a bad thing, but rather opens up the possibility for true understanding of the world and for political liberation. This, of course, is not to imply that everything that comes along with the loss of the aura is itself a good thing—indeed, the alienation of the actor before the camera is probably not good in itself—but it is enough to refrain from making the snap judgment that, as a whole, the difference between stage and film acting involves some kind of fundamental loss of value. Indeed, I read Benjamin’s aim as much broader than simply making judgments about whether certain changes in the production of art are good or bad. Rather, he is concerned with what such changes—whatever value we ascribe to them—mean for art, our relation to art, and the political possibilities that are entailed therein.

Why am I harping on this? It’s because keeping this in mind is necessary for having a proper understanding of the whole piece. We can see this with the last sentence of the section. Having discussed how the actor’s performance is (or can be) fragmented by film, he says: “Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the ‘beautiful semblance’ which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.” If one reads this section (or most of the essay) with the impression that Benjamin is merely lamenting the changes that come as a result in the shift to mechanical reproduction, then this final sentence of the section is a deeply puzzling one. But this isn’t how it should be read because that isn’t what Benjamin is doing. Instead, Benjamin is showing us that our previous mystified idea of what art must be—a unified, complete, integrated whole, with an aura that’s presented in a certain way—is mistaken. Thus, the guiding question here isn’t “is this shift in production good or bad?” nor is it the related “we know theater is art, but is film art?” Film is art, and by seeing it as such, we can see that art is not what our mystified notions of it told us it was. Once that’s recognized, it’s a short step to raising the question “what should we do with art such as this? What do we want to do with it?”

Or, to anticipate the conclusion of the essay, it makes the task before us one of politicizing art rather than aestheticizing politics.

III. New Bullshit

a. The View

I believe Frankfurt’s second biggest mistake—apart from what separates the liar from the bullshitter—is in taking the bullshitter to be much more sophisticated that he really is. Consider, for example, the way Frankfurt describes him near the end of the essay:

A person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom [than the liar]. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he’s not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as needs requires. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist.”1

Frankfurt’s description treats bullshit is a creative activity—it involves artistry.2 It is also dangerous and subversive since it treats bullshitters as rogue agents, defying the norms of speech that the rest of us rely on. But this strikes me as completely inaccurate. Frankfurt seems to have forgotten that above and beyond everything else, bullshit is dumb. The vast majority of the time it doesn’t require any creativity, expertise, or even much effort. It just requires that the speaker makes assertions that are in some way at least minimally relevant to the topic at hand. Once again, think about any of Trump’s bullshit utterances: there’s nothing creative about saying that the IRS is after him because of his strong Christian beliefs!

This is precisely why bullshit so ubiquitous: literally everyone can do it. Bullshit is also, for the most part, obvious and most of us are very good at knowing when we’re in the presence of bullshit. This is why, arguably, we also treat bullshitters more lightly than we do liars—their schemes are easy to spot, and thus, presumably harder to fall prey to. When I fall victim to the liar, I blame him for deceiving me; when I fall victim to the bullshitter, I blame myself for being so gullible.

In that light, the distinctive mark of bullshit isn’t a speaker’s indifference to the truth-value of his assertions, but rather the lack of effort used to conceal his enterprise. In other words, bullshit strikes me simply as inordinately lazy lying—it differs from lying not in kind by some distinction that sets it apart, but in degree of effort used to hide one’s attempts to fool his audience.

I think Frankfurt fails to see this because, in general, it’s easy to conflate laziness with indifference. If I’m being lazy about mowing my lawn it may be fair to make the inference that I’m simply indifferent about the way my yard looks. But that’s obviously not necessary and doesn’t generalize. I might very much care about how my yard looks, but care much more about not doing manual labor, making a statement to the HOA, annoying my neighbor, or whatever. Similarly, if I make an assertion that has the form of a lie, but do so in an extremely half-hearted, easily identifiable way, it may be fair to make the assumption that I don’t really care about what I’m saying or its truth. But as with the yard example, I might very well be sensitive to whether what I’m saying is true or false, but care much more about not having to worry about keeping a story straight, or simply about getting by without putting up too much effort.3 Lying well, after all, is hard and takes a lot of effort—and sometimes that amount of effort is just not worth it.

In other words, apparent (or actual) laziness can be explained in more ways than appealing to indifference and it seems to me that Frankfurt has overlooked this fact or has over-romanticized bullshit too much. As a result, he commits himself to an analysis of bullshit that hangs on the speaker’s indifference rather than his laziness. My proposal is to offer an alternative analysis that focuses on this latter aspect to understand bullshit. In what remains I offer a brief sketch of what such an analysis would look like.

My proposal is a simple one. Like Frankfurt’s analysis, it relies on making a distinction between bullshitting and lying. However, unlike that analysis, it denies that the distinction is one that picks out two different kinds of speech acts. Rather, the distinction is simply a matter of degree of effort put in by the speaker to hide his intent to deceive. So, we can say that bullshitting involves a speaker who makes an assertion with the intent to deceive an audience as a means to achieving some goal, but whose attempt to deceive is so lazy that it rarely goes undetected. In this respect, bullshit is close to bald-faced lying (lying in which both the speaker and the audience know that the speaker is lying and both know that the other knows that the speaker is lying). But it differs from it insofar as bald-faced lies usually involve prior knowledge by both speaker and audience that the speaker is lying or about to lie (even before you ask me I know that you know that I know I broke the vase—yet, you ask me if I did and I tell you no). In contrast, the bullshitter’s enterprise becomes apparent through the poor attempt he makes to disguise his lies. Crucially, bullshit also has the tiniest chance of succeeding in fooling someone whereas a bald-faced lie can never do so precisely because we both know that what I say is a lie.

This way of putting things allows us to avoid the problem that Frankfurt’s theory faced and provides us with a straightforward explanation of what the bullshitter does and why he does it. We don’t run into the problems faced by Frankfurt because we allow that the bullshitter has beliefs about the world and about whether his utterances are true or false. Since he’s allowed to have those beliefs there’s no mystery about how he can engage in means/ends reasoning, and hence, no worry that the only way we can make sense of his actions through anarchic speech. Furthermore, his motivation is clear. He’s motivated by the goals he sets for himself and makes his utterances when he thinks they will help him achieve those goals. In short, he’s motivated by the very same thing that the liar is.

Still, one might wonder why someone would bother to bullshit rather than telling the truth or attempting to get away with a full-blown lie. But we have a ready explanation of this: namely, bullshitting involves very little effort on the part of the speaker and being caught bullshitting usually carries a smaller moral cost than being caught in a lie. By bullshitting the speaker frees himself from having to keep track of the context, what his audience already believes, what he’s committed himself to in the past, and so on. The bullshitter doesn’t have to be invested in his bullshit the way the liar is. At the same time, however, he’s in a position to garner all the benefits that he would get if he were lying—if he’s lucky enough or if his audience is sufficiently careless or ignorant, then he might as well have lied to them. It’s just very unlikely that he’ll succeed in most cases. Furthermore, as already mentioned, bullshit doesn’t carry the same moral condemnation that lying does. Even if caught, the bullshitter can deflect some of the blame he would receive if he were to lie by implicitly relying on the fact that his deception was so obvious (“you weren’t really taking me seriously, were you?”).4

So, on the small chance that his obvious deception goes undetected, the bullshitter gets what he wants without much effort; and if he gets detected, the consequences are relatively fewer than in other cases. In other words, bullshitting is a low-cost/low-risk/low-probability/high-reward strategy for achieving one’s goals. Of course, this is not to suggest that bullshitting is always a successful strategy. In fact, repeated bullshitting might come with the cost of having a reputation for bullshitting which, in turn, could come at a significant cost (everyone remembers the boy who cried bullshit). Constant bullshitting, then, doesn’t seem to be a promising strategy. But then again, neither does constant lying and nothing has been said to suggest that a person who bullshits must bullshit at every occasion. That being said, bullshitting on occasions in which one could get away with it, doing so can be a promising strategy. The better the bullshitter, the better he is at recognizing and acting on those situations in which he can get away with it.5

b. Objections, Replies, and Elaborations

This way of understanding bullshit seems promising. However, it faces a potential objection.6 Recall Trump’s comment from the beginning of the essay/previous post. Surely, that statement is a bit of bullshit and it certainly appears plenty lazy. However, might suppose, counterfactually, that the statement was crafted by a team of experts who worked tirelessly around the clock to figure out precisely what Trump should say to his audience in order to explain his consistent troubles with the IRS. We can imagine them whispering the precise statement to Trump through an ear piece which he then says to Chris Cuomo. Now, the process that went into producing the statement is not a lazy one—many people worked long and hard to produce it—but it seems to make the utterance no less an instance of bullshit than before. But if this is true, then it seems that the distinctive mark of bullshit is not laziness. Just as Frankfurt overestimated how creative bullshit can be and failed to take seriously how lazy it is the majority of the time, so I seem to have underestimate how much work some bullshit requires; i.e. I’ve made the same mistake I’ve accused Frankfurt of making but in the other direction.

This is a fair objection but one that rests on the claim that we would still classify Trump’s utterance as an instance of bullshit once the full story is presented. I take issue with that claim. I grant that my judgment upon hearing Trump’s remarks would be to initially classify it as bullshit. However, if I were to find out that those remarks were the work of concerted effort then I’m more inclined to think that my reaction would be one of puzzlement. People worked hard to produce that?! How could anyone put so much effort into something so patently and apparently implausible. Rather than thinking that Trump is bullshitting, I’d be more inclined to think that he’d hired a team of incompetent liars. In other words, I find it hard to sustain the intuition that what I witnessed was bullshit and not something deeply confusing.

The point is even more obvious if we suppose that there wasn’t a team of writers behind the scenes that produced Trump’s statement, but rather, that it was his hard effort alone that was behind it (we can suppose that Cuomo gave him the interview questions in advance and Trump spent days trying to figure out what to say in response). Under those conditions I think we would be even more inclined to think that he’s a terrible liar than an expert bullshitter. What makes him such is the fact that he so obviously tips his hand that he’s not telling the truth (the IRS is in the business of religious persecution of millionaires?!) while supposedly working hard to prevent that from happening.

A different point can be raised if what I’ve said is true that might appear to be problematic. Namely, it’s a reasonable claim to make that someone who is an expert liar does so with little effort—it is the mark of the expert that they achieve their ends with comparably less effort than their non-expert peers. But if this is true, then it seems that the expert liar is a kind of bullshitter. But if this is the case, then on my view, not only is bullshit a kind of lazy lying, but so is expert lying. Thus, we seem to be threatened with a kind of circle that, if not paradoxical, seem to lead us to the non-informative conclusion that lying is a kind of lying.

I don’t think the prognosis is quite that grim. Recall that I’ve defined bullshitting as a speech act that involves a speaker who makes an assertion with the intent to deceive an audience as a means to achieving some goal, but whose attempt to deceive is so lazy that it rarely goes undetected. This last italicized clause is, I take it, what distinguishes the bullshitter from the expert liar. It’s true, the expert liar is someone for whom lying is easy, but he’s also one whose attempt to lie is not obvious. That’s what makes him good at it—he’s not caught lying! The way to describe his predicament, then, isn’t to say that lying isn’t a low-effort activity for the expert liar because it’s not worth the effort for him, but because he’s gotten so good at it. In other words, what used to take a lot of effort now can now be done with comparable ease. This isn’t the case for the bullshitter whose attempts to pull the wool over his audience’s eyes is, for the most part, fairly transparent. To restate what I’ve said earlier in a different way, the bullshitter gets the benefit of not having to put in a lot of work at the cost of making him easy to spot. Sometimes that works, but most times it’s a gamble. This is not the case with the expert liar; and since this isn’t the case, the expert liar is not a bullshitter. In turn, there’s no circle and the analysis remains informative.

Where does that leave us? I believe the view I’ve presented here does a better job of helping us understand the phenomenon of bullshit without encountering the problems I’ve raised for Frankfurt. Nevertheless, my account does suggest that bullshit is perhaps less exciting than we may have thought. After all, on my view, there’s no inherent artistry in bullshit, nor is the bullshitter the ultimate enemy of truth, nor is bullshitting even a distinct speech act. Rather, the bullshitter is just our old friend the liar who hasn’t bothered to dress up for the occasion. I admit this might be a little disappointing and the only words of comfort I have to offer are that in losing a more interesting picture of bullshit we’re at the same time getting a more accurate picture of lying at the same time. And that seems worthwhile.

IV. What’s so Bad About Bullshit

The account of bullshit I’ve defended here not only avoids the problems that Frankfurt’s faces, but it also helps explain why we might nevertheless remain worried about bullshit. Contra Frankfurt, bullshit is not problematic because it signals a certain disregard for the truth—at least not directly. Rather the reason why bullshit is objectionable is, for the most part, the same reason lying is objectionable. We should oppose the seeming proliferation in bullshit because an increase in bullshit means an increase in lying! True, it’s more easily detectable lying, but it’s lying nevertheless.

But there’s a further reason to oppose bullshit. Namely, bullshit signifies the expression of a certain kind of attitude towards others. To be bullshitted is, in a way, to be treated as someone who doesn’t even deserve the effort of a full-blown lie. The expression of such an attitude isn’t always objectionable. However, when it becomes the prevue of the person holding the highest office of the land, for example, and when this bullshit becomes a frequent occurrence, it can signify a strong disdain for the office itself, and for the people that it is meant to serve.

Consider another more pernicious example of Trump’s bullshit made following the events of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA in which a young woman was murdered. When asked by a reporter why he waited so long to denounce the white supremacists involved with the murder (Trump waited three days before making a statement of condemnation), he said:

I didn’t wait long. I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement. The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement. But you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the facts. It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don’t know the facts. And it’s a very, very important process to me. And it’s a very important statement. So, I don’t want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement. I want to know the facts.7

This remark strikes me as equally bullshit as his remark about the IRS. Trump is not someone who waits for the facts to come in before he speaks and his insistence to the contrary is pathetically lazy at best. When he bullshits the American public by saying that he didn’t give a statement because he’s such a careful speaker and cares deeply for the facts, he treats (at least some portion of his audience) derisively—as people who are perhaps too stupid to require something more than the thinnest lie, or, more than likely, as people who don’t even deserve more than that. To address a significant portion of the public who are worried about the rise of far-right extremism under his watch with bullshit is to tell them that their concerns aren’t serious in his eyes, and, by proxy, are not serious in the eyes of the nation.

In other words, pervasive bullshitting is symptomatic of a certain degrading attitude towards others. To the extent that this practice is prevalent in society at large, we should be worried; but to the extent that it is pervasive in places where degrading treatment of others is a dangerous thing (politics, public policy, healthcare, etc.) we should be horrified.

V.                  Conclusion

We began by focusing on the simple distinction Frankfurt makes between lying and bullshit. We saw that when we try to get clear on how this distinction was supposed to work out we run into serious problems: it’s either the case that lying becomes exceedingly rare, that bullshit becomes exceedingly rare, or the distinction disappears altogether. I argued that this is reason enough to give up the distinction as Frankfurt presents it. I also argued that Frankfurt runs into these problems because he takes bullshit to be much more sophisticated than it really is. Bullshit isn’t sophisticated—it’s dumb, easy to detect, and lazy. These are the distinctive marks of bullshit. Once we remember this, it becomes easy to explain how bullshit works and why people are motivated to bullshit without encountering any of Frankfurt’s problems.

The Good:

1. It’s Funny! (Really): The film got some genuine laughs out of me multiple times! In fact, the very opening homage to 2001: A Space Oddyssey in which the little girls are iroining their pathetic baby clothes was super clever and set the tone really well. I knew I was in for a good time and was ready to laugh. A couple of other scenes struck out as well. In particular, I was floored by Ryan Gosling’s song-and-dance number, the Matchbox 20 “Push” group serenade by all the Kens, and Michael Cera killing a man with a shovel after yelling “I’m Alan! I’m Ken’s buddy! All of his clothes fit me!”
   
   One of the rather odd upshots of the film is that because Barbie was the protagonist who had to go on her hero’s journey, she frequently plays “the straight man” along with the other Barbies. Consequently, that makes Ryan Gosling’s Ken (and, to a certain degree the other Kens as well) the funny, comic relief. This is not to suggest that Margot Robbie doesn’t have any good funny lines, but what tends to stick in my head at least are her more emotional beats rather than anything that had me roaring. One exception, of course, is Margot Robbie’s “Do you guys ever think about death?” in the middle of the opening dance number. Really good stuff.
   
   All in all, though, I was really pleasantly surprised by the humor and I thought the film did a good job of making a quirky, campy experience.
   

2. The Look: Perhaps more than even Oppenheimer, I thought the set design and costuming was quite good. Barbieland looked like a plastic playset and had this kind of trippy feel, in part, I think, because of the selective use of green screen at certain parts. I don’t have much to say about the parts filmed in “the real world” other than to say that movies always make LA look much nicer than it is in real life.
   
   One thing that I thought was rather odd was that the film originally seemed to set a boundary between the magical, fantastical world of Barbieland and the every-day reality of the Real World. However, that distinction is thrown out the window as soon as we enter the Mattel headquarters—there, for some reason, we’re back in the realm of the magical and where ghosts can rent out a floor to cosplay as the Oracle and be grandmotherly. I don’t understand why they made that choice (other than, of course, to underscore the fact that Mattel is a magical place), but it wasn’t too distracting.
   

3. The Cast: I really liked that it seemed as though everyone was just having a good time on the set. Ryan Gosling, in particular, really seemed to give it his all and showed off his chops as a comedy actor. Margot Robbie was, of course, fantastic and I don’t think anyone could have done as well as she did, and America Ferrera was also quite good (though, I didn’t care much for the child actor that played her daughter—sorry!). The supporting cast of Barbies and Kens weren’t anything exciting to write home about, but they did a decent enough job of being odd and plastic to where it worked well with the film.

The Bad (exactly what you’d expect from me):

Most of what I have to say is just stuff that you could have figured out before setting foot in the theater, and although this section is much longer than the “good” section, I don’t want to give the impression of harping on the movie for failing to be what I thought it could be. I especially don’t want these criticisms to be contrasted with the Oppenheimer review where I didn’t take any serious political/critical stance, but only talked about the more formal elements that struck me in the film. In other words, I don’t want to produce any of the annoying Twitter—sorry, I mean X.com—discourse that I mentioned there in this post. I really did enjoy the movie on the whole, and I think the positives outweigh the negatives. But because it’s much easier to be critical and because I have a little more knowledge of feminist theory than I do of nuclear physics, I’ve allowed myself more room to be critical. In any case, nothing that I’ll say should be surprising to anyone.

1. Superficial Feminist Critiques, Shallow Political Outlook, and Gender Essentialism: Anyone who has read even one book on feminist thought will find nothing new or interesting being developed in the film—anyone who got as far as second wave feminism will find its approach hamfisted. Furthermore—and bear with me, I know this is pedantic—the criticism itself can’t get past the importance of ideas. It is, in other words, a feminist criticism that’s very much trapped in a kind of naive idealism.
   
   For example, after the incredibly didactic dialogue on the double bind given by America Ferrera, the Barbies explain the patriarchy as a kind of brainwashing. In Barbieland, this brainwashing is the result of having no natural immunity to patriarchal ideas, creating a bizarre parallel between ideas and viruses: just as the virus corrupts the body and causes it to be ill, so the idea of the patriarchy corrupts social relations and causes women to become subservient to men. In a parallel turn, the solution to the Barbies’ problem is, in the first place, to heal and inoculate each other with a series of consciousness raising sessions (just as one heals and inoculates the sick body), and then to seize power by…sigh…voting in a new constitution. The overall message here is, of course, that the same affliction that has befallen the Barbies is the same affliction that affects us in the real world too. All we that we have to do in order to defeat the patriarchy is to just tell each other about how unfair practice x, y, or z is and once enough people know about it we can, uh…vote on it. (This isn’t even second wave feminism! This is just first wave stuff!). The problem, of course, is that that hasn’t ever worked. In fact, having come from the Real World, America Ferrera’s character knows this—she knows that other women know what she knows because she frequently stresses that the things that Barbie finds strange are things that real women understand quite well. So, the solution proposed ends up being this neurotic repetition: it didn’t work last time, but this time…when we can say the right things…1
   
   At the same time, the film treats men’s role in creating and supporting the patriarchy with a surprisingly gentle hand: the reason Ken brings these ideas into Barbieland is because he’s bound in an interpersonal relationship with Barbie in which he lacks an identity. Barbie is and can be everything, and Ken is just Ken and does nothing. It’s his Luciferian twist—his desire to be recognized by the Big Other—that motivates the creation of Kendom, and, that, at the end of the day ends up being a kind of maintenance of a certain kind of libidinal economy. One is given the impression that if Barbie was just nicer to Ken and helped him find meaning in his own life, then all of the problems could have been avoided. Now, I’m of the general opinion that feminism is not the discipline of putting men down and that both men and women need to be included in its construction (after all, the patriarchy hurts men too!), but this was, I think, too conciliatory. I quite like that Barbie recognizes that her world can’t go back to being the way it was before, nor should it be one in which half of the population of Barbieland is just superfluous, but one in which a new social order is established. Yet, her solution is a puzzling one, and one that, I think, just belies the political limits of this kind of corporate feminism: namely, her suggestion is that the don’t think of themselves as “it’s Barbie and Ken” but “it’s Barbie and it’s Ken.” Having recognized that the two are deeply, interdependent and that their social life is a result of navigating their interdependence, Barbie just suggests something akin to “what if we were just equally independent.” In other words, after developing the thesis that the very core of the problem is they can’t be equally independent because one’s independence is always contingent on the recognition of the Other, we just retreat once again to the same neurotic repetition.2
   
   Finally, the film’s sexual politics rest on a firm notion of gender essentialism: on the one hand, there are women (including trans women) and they have a certain essential psychology that defines them, and on the other hand, there are men who have an equally essential psychology. There’s variation within each group3 but the whole movie is driven by the fundamental differences between men and women and how “too much” of one side’s influence ends up being a bad thing for the other. The upshot of this essentialism is, of course, that the best we can hope for is, once again, a kind of detente between the sexes in which each learns to compromise with the other and to live around each other. There is no overcoming, no transcending these difference to create something new, but only the eternal male and female. This, again, is just a bourgeois liberal politics.
   
   This kind of essentialism was most obviously on display during the marketing and soft social-media blitzes that accompanied it. Everyone knew that simply going to the theater required dressing up in pink and presenting very femme, and while this very practice can be read in queer terms, the vast majority of what I saw at least, was of traditionally femme women going full-throttle femme. In other words, it appeared to me as a kind of pseudo-reactionary reclamation of “traditional femininity” which involves pink bows, special outfits, and so on. This phenomenon also seems to map on to another surprising phenomenon that I was made aware of yesterday: when one measures the Barbie and Oppenheimer ticket sales by state, Barbie sales dominate the conservative South. In fact, the Barbie/Oppenheimer distribution bears a very strong similarity to maps showing the political distribution of the 2016 election. Now, this might be a coincidence, and, to be honest, the map itself might just be fake. But if it’s not, then at least one plausible explanation is that Barbie would be especially popular in precisely those places in the US where people are very much concerned with gender essentialist politics.
   
   [This, for what it’s worth is also at the core of the whole Barbenheimer phenomenon. Were we not aware that the precise mismatch between these movies is summarized by “Oppenheimer is for boys, Barbie is for girls! What if we saw them back to back!”?]
   

2. Silence, Brand!: All of the previous criticisms, I believe, rest on the fact that this is a film made by the Mattel corporation to sell toys. As such, the film cannot surpass its capitalist framework. Even if Gerwig and Baumbach could have written a truly radical feminist critique by focusing on a commodity, that film simply wouldn’t have been made. You just can’t have a film that is critical of the very structures that underpin and reproduce the conditions that feminism criticizes and at the same time show off Chevy’s exciting new line of electric vehicles. The material systems of production and reproduction cannot be altered even within the fantastical context of the movie because they cannot be taken to be alterable outside of it. Indeed, the question of what can be altered within the world of the movie speaks to the limits of what the current ideology permits.
   
   Consider: at its core, the film is about finding one’s place in the world, embracing one’s individuality (even if that individuality is ‘to be ordinary’), and reframing one’s position in the world so as to bear a better relationship to it. It doesn’t ask “why is America Ferrera so miserable?” Instead it plays on certain ideas about the “imporant things in life” and yokes them with the product that’s being sold. Barbie mediates the relationships between mother and daughter and helps them repair their standing with each other (America Ferrera’s character to her daughter) just as Barbie mediates the relationship between the self and one’s image of the self (America Ferrera to herself). The meta-narrative, driven by nostalgia and supported by the interminable end of history, is that we know ourselves and each other not through our interactions and the relationships we build with each other, but first and foremost through the things that allow us to have such interactions and relationships. This is precisely the mystification that Marxists so frequently talk about and that is a central pillar of the capitalist mode of production.
   
   Within this mode of production the horizon for possibilities is limited. As stated, you can’t change the social relations that underlie it which might, for example, suggest that Barbie or Chevy or whoever are corporations with interests antithetical to yours and mine (or whose interests coincide with yours only to the extent that it’s profitable). But you can change the thoughts and ideas in your head about how you relate to them, and how you relate to yourself and to others through them. At the same time, you can also fold in a cynical awareness of the endeavor that the corporations are a part of. Thus, you can make Will Farrel the doofus CEO who roams around with his hapless gang of executives; you can have them acknowledge that all the C-level execs are men; you can have Helen Mirren point out that the idea of Margot Robbie “feeling ordinary” is absurd; you can have Rhea Perlman play the ghost of Ruth Handler and stress how different she is from the product she created. All that can be done because none of it makes a difference because none of it suggests anything more than a shrug of the shoulders, a “ain’t that weird” recognition of reality, and a kind of cynical knowledge that you’re being marketed to.
   
   Hence, why the feminist analysis ends up being shallow, why the political vision is limited, and why we see a kind of reactionary gender essentialism run through the project. A radical critique of all these things would require a radically different outlook, and what’s needed to sell products is an essentially conservative one.
   
   (To be clear, I don’t think this is a unique fault of the film Barbie—for the same reasons you can’t have the G.I. Joe movies offer a radical critique of masculinity, or the Transfomers movies offer a radical critique of, say, climate change)

On the Whole:

3.5/5 (and two bags of soda). Okay, despite the long discussion, it really was not bad! I mean, I can confidently say that I enjoyed most of the movie. It really was fun, and, unlike Oppenheimer, I can see myself putting this on to watch again once it comes out on VOD. To be honest, I don’t think the film lives up to the hype and I think Greta Gerwig has done better work in developing serious themes in the infinitely better Lady Bird, but as far as movies made about children’s toys go (and there are a LOT), it wasn’t a bad couple of hours.

At the end of the day, I think it’s fair to say that the real winners of Barbenheim are the ad teams for both films who somehow managed to answer the question “Why should I spend money to see a movie this weekend?” with “Well…what if you spent money seeing two films?”

Alright, today we’re doing Barbenheimer (not back-to-back, thankfully) and I wanted to get some thoughts down before I forget my initial impressions. Oppenheimer was first.

The Good:

1. Acting: On the whole, I thought the acting was very strong from the entire ensemble cast. As much as I don’t generally like their ouvres, Robert Downey Jr. and Matt Damon did a fantastic job as Lewis Strauss and Gen. Leslie Groves respectively. And, of course, Cillian Murphy was wonderful as Oppenheimer. Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh were also quite good, but, frankly, it didn’t feel like they were in the movie enough to flex their acting talents as well as they do in other films. Emily Blunt has a wonderful scene in the third act during one of the security clearance hearings, but, on the whole, her character was pretty underdeveloped and amounted to “chronic drunk.” The rest of the ensemble cast was also quite good and enjoyable to watch (honorable mention to Jack Quaid, playing Richard Feynman, just going nuts on the bongos).
   

2. Practical Sets, Effects, and Sound Design: I’m not actually sure how many of the special effects were practical and how many were CGI, but, in my book, not being able to tell is a good thing. Of course, some of the fanatastical scenes were obviously CGI, but I suspect that a lot of the explosions were real, and the set design and costumes (which were not CGI, of course) gave the whole film a real weight. One really gets the feeling that they’re seeing what the places looked like, how people dressed, what the nature of their work looked like, and so on. It’s easy to buy into the world of the movie and that’s always a good thing.
   
   I also thought that the sound design was great, and, in particular, I thought the repeated use of the foot-stomping/train-gathering-speed motif was used very effectively. I thought that small bit was so good at bringing to mind both the idea of a chain reaction which starts out small and builds up to something exponentially larger and larger, and the idea that once events are set in motion, they can take on a direction and magnitute of their own beyond our intentions.
   
   Another part where I thought the sound design was really effective was in the scene where Oppenheimer tells the team that the bombs have been dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the majority of that scene all the audience can hear is Oppenheimer’s words while the raucus sounds of the celebrating crowd are purposefully muted. However, at one point—and as a way of highlighting Oppenheimer attempting to process his trauma—a single scream comes through just briefly. The effect is immediately frightening since one can’t immediately put together whether what they heard is a scream of joy or a scream of agony.
   

3. Moral Ambivalence/Central Message: There’s a lot of really, really dumb Twitter discourse over the most superficial elements of the film and its ethical implications. I’m not going to comment on that other than to express my continued surprise at the incomprehensible (to me) desire for people to see sterilized one-to-one representations of their own moral vision in film. Rather, I want to briefly say that I thought the central moral message of the film was done quite well.
   
   The first thing to note in that respect is the development of the tension between so-called “Great Men” and “The Cunning of Spirit” frameworks of understanding history. On the one hand, the film hits hard on the fact that the Manhattan Project would not have proceeded the way it did if Oppenheimer didn’t take a part in it. Maybe it still would have continued in a similar fashion under someone else’s direction, but the film makes it apparent that a lot of the way in which it did proceed was due to the choices that Oppenheimer made. On the other hand, it also makes it abundantly clear that the choices that were made were ones made in the context of much bigger forces operating in the background and which no single person or persons could stand. This isn’t exactly breaking new ground—this is an old trope—but I thought the dialectic here was quite nice.
   
   The second thing that I thought Nolan did quite well was show how one can get, as it were, “swept up” in something strictly through a kind of inertia. As an illustration, I have in mind the scene set during one of the hearings when the proscutor is grilling Oppenheimer about his moral objections to the Hydrogen bomb and how that’s at odds with his having no such objections to the development of the original atom bomb. The scene does a great job in convincing the audience that there’s something odd about this change of heart in a way that doesn’t absolve Oppenheimer of any blame or engender any deep sympathy for him (did he not help pick out the targets for the original bombing?!), but which nevertheless plays on the fact that we’ve been following him through the process and have, subconsciously, at least, been invested in his success. In a way, we can understand (without endorsing, of course), the moves he made in the process to distance himself from his “leftist leanings” and to be brilliant, and that tension is brought to a head when, at the moment in which he is trying to do “the right thing” (i.e., limit the further development of nuclear technology), we are reminded of just what that means concretely. The connection that we’ve built with Oppenheimer qua protagonist is exploited nicely at that point in the film to produce some real tension in the audience.1

The Bad:

1. Editing/Pacing: The editing of this movie is abysmal—everything is crammed in so quickly and so much ground is covered that one gets the feeling that one is watching a super long movie trailer or montage for the first two hours. I was yearning for an extended conversation or something to slow down the pace of the film and give some space for character development to happen, but it just didn’t. I supsect this is an artifact of the movie’s already massive runtime, but it wasn’t good. To be fair, the pacing ends up working for the third act of the film when it becomes a kind of tense legal drama, but it was really bad in the first act and pretty bad in the second.
   

2. Some Just God-Awful, Corny Writing: I can’t remember all of these examples, but there were quite a few parts in the film that just had me rolling my eyes and groaning. The one that sticks out as the most eregious offender, however, is Murphy and Pugh’s first sex scene. After having a really tortured (though mercifully brief) conversation about Freud, Pugh picks out a Sanskrit copy of the Bhagavad Gita, opens it to a random page, and while stradling Oppenheimer mid-coitus, makes him read it to her. The line he reads? You guessed it: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”2 Barf! There were a couple of other moments when things were so melodramatic or on the nose that it felt insulting, but, as I mentioned, I can’t recall them precisely. I had the full expectation that at one point Cilian Murphy would look straight down the barrel and say “I, J. Robert Oppenheimer, am a complicated fellow!” I guess, on the whole, Christopher Nolan isn’t known for his stellar writing, but it was really apparent in some of the dialogue in this film. That, coupled with some of the over-the-top melodrama (c.f., poisoned apple, throwing glasses, Emily Blunt’s drunk antics) was just too much for me.

On the Whole:

3.5/5 (and two bags of soda). Really strong third act, decent second act, abysmal first act. Strong acting, pleasant to look at and listen to, some interesting psychological exploration, but, on the whole, nothing to get super worked up about.3 Didn’t regret seeing it, won’t see it for a couple of years.

Section VII

In part 3, we covered a bit of the broad history of aesthetics, focusing on the shift from representationalism to expressionism and, finally, to art-for-art’s-sake. This brief history is once again relevant here. Recall, on the representationalist framework, good art is art that accurately represents the world and a good artist is someone who can capture their subject matter best. Photography poses a serious challenge to this notion: if the goal is to show what things actually look like, a photograph does a much better job than any other kind of manually produced visual art form. And if that’s the case, then it appears that anyone with a camera suddenly becomes an artist and anything produced by this little machine is art (indeed, maybe better art than anything previously produced by hand)!

The response to this challenge was to deny that art really was about accurate representation after all. Instead, the role of the artist and the function of art shifted to, on the one hand the accurate representation of the internal world—the artist’s emotion, their feelings, intentions, etc.—or, on the other hand, to the exhibition of the formal properties of the piece itself. In other words, representationalism was out and expressionism and formalism were in. This allowed us to answer the question of what art was, but it left open the question of whether photography was an art from.1

The question seems silly to us today—of course photography is an art from—and it appeared just as “devious and confused” for Benjamin in 1930. For him, however, what’s interesting is not the way in which the question was settled, but the way in which the whole debate represented a “symptom of a historical transformation.”2

By calling it a symptom, Benjamin is, of course, reminding us that it was not the discourse that was driving the development of art, but something else: namely, the change in means of (re)production. First come the technological changes, then come the symptoms. Or, to put it another way: first come the material changes, then the ideas—not the other way around.

This, of course, escaped the notice of his contemporaries. Instead of asking whether the very nature of art had changed because of the invention of photography, they, instead, asked the nearby (devious and confused) question of whether photography fit into the existing understanding of art.

[Here, I think Benjamin is being a little uncharitable since, quite clearly, the shift towards expressionism and formalism does indicate an awareness that art itself had been transformed. It is possible, however, that he is addressing some select group of thinkers who claimed that art has always been about the expression of emotions or the presentation of significant form. And some people really did write this way. If that’s the case, then, Benjamin’s point still stands: this is a kind of ahistorical, confused way of understanding what’s happening. I digress]

Crucially, Benjamin was seeing the same discourse play out in his day with regard to film with theoreticians raising the same confused questions. What interests him the most here is the regressive understanding that such thinkers offered of film, and specifically, how their attempts to see film as art inevitably draws them back into the cultic and to the supposed ritual value that film must have.

The pattern is the same as with photography: having not realized that it is film itself that has changed art by virtue of its mechanical reproduction, the theoreticians and critics try to fit film into the preexisting mold of what counts as art. This has a twofold effect: first, it makes them ask stupid and confused questions (viz., is film art?), and second, it makes them try to answer these confused questions by appealing to the existing and mystified understanding of art—namely, through an appeal to the aura. Hence, on the one hand, the advocates of film as art try to stress that film is magic (“Do not all the bold descriptions we have given amount to the definition of prayer?”; “Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambiance.”); and, on the other hand, those who argue against its status as art try to stress that it lacks that magical element (“The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities…these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural mans and with incomparable persuasiveness all that fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.”)

Now, you may be tempted to think that this is some curious artifact of the novelty of a new art form—a kind of temporary lack of media literacy that Benjamin is putting his finger on—but I think we’re very much seeing the same thing happen today. In fact, chances are you’ve seen it happen without even realizing it. Let me explain.

Let’s talk about Nicole Kidman and AMC

It’s reasonable to say that we are in an era in which the means of art (re)production have shifted—to put it pithily, whereas Benjamin was witness to the age of mechanical reproduction of art, we are witness to the age of digital reproduction of art.3 Art, in all of its forms, can now meet us freely at any moment right on the screen of the little computers we keep in our pockets at all times. Not only do we not have to go to the museum to see a Van Gogh or to the choral hall to listen to Mozart, but we no longer even have to be limited to specific prints or records of those paintings and arrangements. After all, a poster of Starry Night is always just a poster of Starry Night—with the help of the internet, however, your phone can show and play you anything.

Chances are that, like me, you probably subscribe to some kind of internet streaming service. For just a couple of dollars a month, each of us now has access to an unimaginable quantity of films beamed directly into our homes. This was a godsend during the pandemic when going to the movies was impossible, and although this way of consuming media didn’t raise the question of whether streaming movies were art, it did raise a couple of other reactions that fit Benjamin’s analysis rather well.4

In particular, I want to talk about Nicole Kidman’s commercial for AMC. You can see it below:

I kind of love this ad because, even before we factor any of the stuff I’m about to talk about, it’s weird (I’ll leave why that is for the footnotes).5 Here’s the full transcript for those who can’t watch the ad.

We come to this place for magic.

We come to AMC Theaters to laugh, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us.

That indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim and we go somewhere we’ve never been before.

Not just entertained, but somehow reborn together. Dazzling images on a silver screen. Sound that I can feel.

Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

Our heroes feel like the best parts of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful…

Because here…they are

Notice, first, what the ad wants us to believe (cynically or otherwise): going to the movie theater is a unique and un-substitutable experience. The language used is strictly the language of mystification. To go see a movie is to commune with the magical; the feelings that one experiences in a theater are not only indescribable but also, and at the same time, socially necessary, completely familiar, and inverted; to see a movie in a theater is to participate in collective rebirth; it is to catch a glimpse of the possibility of our better nature and realize it. Wow!6

Do the advertisers who put this together mean all this? Probably not. In all fairness, like all advertising, this commercial is trying to do get you to do something, but the language that it uses in order to do so is not incidental. The language used is language that at least some people think will be effective, and it is supposed to be effective because, at some level it’s supposed to be plausible. The ad could have been written to stress other aspects of going to the movies, but it precisely hits on the notion that just like seeing a painting in person is special because of its aura, so going to see a movie in the theater is special for the same reason.

But let’s do away with the mystification. What American Multi-Cinema Inc. wants you to do is to pay around $15 to go to a space that, for the last three years or so has been virtually abandoned because it posed a serious public health hazard.7 They want you to spend the same amount of money on a single movie that you can spend with a streaming service in order to see hundreds of movies. And the way in which it chose to do this is to double down on the ritual value of the art form.

To put it another way, this is a response to the material changes in the means of art (re)production. These changes have torn film away from the aura that it has in relation to its physical location and have made film cheaply and widely accessible to more people than before, which, in turn, has brought forth a crisis regarding the old mode of (re)production. And just as manually reproduced art retreated into ritual value of the aura in the face of mechanical reproduction (remember: you have to see the Mona Lisa at The Louvre!), so movie theaters retreat likewise in the face of digital reproduction (“We come to this place for magic.”)

This is what Benjamin is talking about.

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AMC did not do well in the pandemic. That low point in the graph is right at the height of the pandemic and those high points were the apex of the meme stock craze. As you can see, that trend was short-lived. AMC desperately needs you to go back to the theater.

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PREFACE: I originally wanted to write about sections VI and VII, but, as usual, there were just too many interesting things to talk about. So, instead of making a giant post I’m only gonna talk about VI and some comments regarding “Post-Modern Cultural Marxism.”

Section VI

We ended the last section by noting that we are explicitly focused on art works that are made to be reproduced, and not on the reproduction of existing art works. Specifically, we are going to focus on photography (and later, film), but, more broadly, we can talk about any set of art works for which the question of authenticity can’t arise. Recall that when two identical oil paintings confront each other, the question of which on is the authentic one makes sense: one was painted first ,and the other was a copy of that first one. We discover the difference by tracing the history of both and determining which one is the original—that one retains its authenticity. The same cannot be said about two photographs.1 It simply doesn’t make sense to ask which of two prints of the same photo is authentic and which one is a copy of it. In one sense, they’re both copies of each other and they’re both equally authentic; in another sense, neither is a copy of the other and the question involves a category mistake. The fact that the question doesn’t make sense unless we start using the term “copy” in a different sense than we normally do indicates that the the very idea of authenticity is undermined when talking about such objects. Indeed, we witness this undermining process as the production of art begins to stress a work’s exhibition value rather its cultic value.

So far, so good—we’ve covered this in detail before.

The shift in question, however, is not frictionless and the cultic value attempts to reassert itself. In photography, it makes its last stand by focusing on the human face.

The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face

Thus, for example, the soldier in the trenches carries with him a picture of his beloved’s portrait because it reminds him of her.2 And there does seem to be a kind of magic in this practice—it’s as though the photo says “here’s a real, particular person—a unique being whom you have a particular relationship with! This is exactly what she looks like!” He looks at her to feel her presence. If the soldier dies, his beloved can look at her picture of him and remember what he looked like, how much they loved each other, and so on. The image of his face can meet her across time and space and from beyond death itself! If that’s not magic, then I don’t know what is.

Let’s grant that at least in some respect this is true—some photos are uniquely special to us. This can very well be true, but Benjamin insists that apart from these cases (“as man withdraws from the photographic image”), the exhibition value of photography shows its superiority. How? Here things get a bit tricky because Benjamin points us to Atget’s photographs of Paris as the first time this superiority becomes apparent:

It has quite justly been said of him [Atget] that he photographed them [the streets of Paris] like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.

Set aside the question of the “hidden political significance” of this picture for the moment, and focus on the analogy between a photograph taken at a crime scene and the photograph above. As Benjamin reminds us, photographs at a crime scene are taken in order to preserve a record of what things really looked like—the detectives then refer to it to deduce whodunnit or how the crime transppired. In the same way, the empty Parisian street shows us how Paris really looked.3 The above photograph isn’t a product of a particular artist’s interpretation, mediated by their eye and hand, but is an actual recording of reality: light bounced off the objects in the street, through the camera’s lens, and onto the photosensitive material which produced a negative. There’s no magic happening here but simply a documenting of reality.

Okay, but why think this has a political significance? And how does this show that the exhibition value is superior to the cultic value? Let’s consider an answer to the first question.

They [Atget’s photos] demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.

This is a puzzling claim, but, I believe, key to understanding it is understanding why free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to these photographs. To contemplate freely is to not be constrained by anything external, but to just focus on and enjoy different elements of the work. One can easily do this if, on the one hand, the work of art in front of them is devoid of subject matter—free-floating contemplation is the order of the day for abstract art, for example. On the other hand, one can also freely contemplate fictitious representations that do have a subject matter. Consider, for example, the following painting by Zdzislaw Beksinski:

Clearly, this painting depicts something (something spooky!), but not something real. As such, the viewer can freely contemplate on how Beksinski chose to depict the hundreds of bony knuckles of the musician, how these bumpy, bony structures contrast with the smoothness of the trumpet, and so on.

We can, of course, do something similar with the Atget photo above, paying attention to the different advertisements on the buildings, the texture of the cobblestone street, etc. Nevertheless, we are constrained by the fact that unlike Beksinki’s trumpet player, we can’t eliminate the fact that we know we’re looking at a real street. Reality impinges on us in photographs in a way that makes truly free contemplation inappropriate.

But is that right? It’s not implausible to insist that there isn’t anything especially challenging about the Atget photo. So what’s going on?

I think the core phenomenon that Benjamin has in mind is a rather subtle one that tends to be overlooked for people like us who have always been exposed to photographs. However, his claim is more plausible than it might appear at first glance if we consider some less-subtle cases. Consider, for example, Eddie Adams’ Pulitzer Prize winning photo “Saigon Execution” (I won’t post the photo here, but chances are that you’ve already seen it; and if not, you can click the link to the Wikipedia article). The photo shows the moment right before South Vietnamese Brigadier General Ngoc Nguyễn Loan executes Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém with a shot to the head from a .38 revolver. The viewer quite literally sees the moment in which Loan’s bullet enters Lém’s head.

Now, in one sense, I suppose it’s possible to freely contemplate this image and detach oneself from the fact that one is looking at a murder to consider the shadows and composition. But there really does seem to be something inappropriate in such a reaction at least part of which is due to the fact that what one sees really happened. The viewer is challenged not only by the gruesome theme of the photograph, but also by the fact that it is documenting something actual as it happened.

Notice that the effect isn’t the same in manually (re)produced pieces of art even if those depict a real event. Here’s a drawing (etching?) of the assassination of Alexander II:

It, too, depicts a real event, but because it is a drawing of that event, its significantly easier to engage in free contemplation. At least I find it much, much easier to do so.

Likewise, it seems less inappropriate to engage in free contemplation of other images depicting much more horrendous (but not real) events. Below is a panel from Junji Ito’s Uzumaki in which a man who has become obsessed with spirals has turned himself into a spiral by horribly distorting his body.

It’s a horrifying drawing, but largely due to the fact that this didn’t really happen, it seems acceptable to, say, contemplate the pen-work of the artist, to focus on the interlocking, broken fingers, the shading on the foot, and so on.

This is not to say that paintings or drawings in general can’t challenge or arrest us—of course they can—but only to illustrate what I think Benjamin has in mind here. If you can get a sense of how the fact that something depicted is real can make a difference as to how one should relate to the work, then you’ve got the general idea.

The challenge that the viewer experiences accompanies another new phenomenon:

At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him [the viewer], right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting.

At the same time that photographs bring is in direct contact with reality as it really was or is, and by virtue of its mechanically reproduced nature, photography also brings us in contact with a reality deprived of context. In essence, what we implicitly recognize is that a) “what’s depicted is real” and b) “we don’t know what exactly is being depicted.” It is for this reason that captions become obligatory in magazines: without them the reader wouldn’t know that they’re looking at, say, a picture of a demonstration at Nevsky Prospect from the Russian Revolution rather than just a depiction of something that happened somewhere.

For the first time photography makes it such that bits of reality need to be interpreted.4

If reality doesn’t speak for itself, then the question of what it says and who provides its interpretation becomes very important. And that, of course, is a political matter.

We’re almost at the end. We only need to remember one final bit from section III in order to see the full picture: the masses have a fundamental desire “to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” This desire, recall, is ultimately a desire to understand the world and how it works. So much so that the masses are willing to sacrifice the authenticity of a particular, and hence, are willing to destroy the aura of the reproduced object in order to gain this understanding.5

Let’s return to the two questions we raised earlier: why do photographs have a hidden political significance? And why (or in what way) does the exhibition value of this kind of art trump the cultic value found in manually reproduced art?

We can answer both questions by summarizing what has been presented so far: photography’s exhibition value trumps its cultic value because it satisfies the desires of the masses to understand the world. It can satisfy this desire because it presents its the masses with reality as it is (or was) rather than mystifying and obscuring. And, in turn, it can present reality as it is (or was) because of the mechanical process involved in its (re)production.

Side Discussion: Isn’t this the Post-Modern Cultural Marxism that my Pee-Pop talks about?!

Okay, I hate having to talk about this, but, sadly, it’s relevant here.

First, what is “Post-Modern Cultural Marxism?”

The term, taken literally is nonsense,6 but it is often used to refer to the general idea that Leftists (Marxists) impose their ideology through a strict control of popular culture and education. Here’s how this is supposed to work: on the one hand, Leftists control access to the production of cultural products—mainly television, film, art, and music—and infuse those products with subversive messages that the unsuspecting public (and especially children) consume and internalize. Depending on what flavor of conservative you are, those messages encourage sexual deviancy, anti-patriotic sentiment, reverse-racism, satanic worship, or any other number of horrible things you can imagine.7 On the other hand, educators, the media, and cultural critics—all of whom work hand-in-hand with the producers of that culture and instruct them on the messaging—control the interpretation of pop culture through the application of social, political and economic punishments for any deviation. By doing this, the Left is able to crush dissent and impose complete thought control on the population.

In practice, it looks like this: You send your beautiful, God-fearing child to college and after only a year, they come back with blue hair and “new pronouns.” Whereas previously they loved Thanksgiving, they’re now talking about how it’s a holiday that white-washes the brutality of settler colonialism and not a celebration of fraternal love! They won’t let you mention your favorite football team by name and when you roll your eyes at one of the players taking a knee they lecture you on the history of policing (as though your uncle wasn’t a cop that let you touch his gun). What the hell is going on? The answer, of course, is that the Cultural Marxists have gotten to your precious angel. They’ve taken facts about the police, football, history, American values, and even biology and reinterpreted them brainwash your child so they can use her as a pawn in their subversive agenda.

This, it should be clear, is a cowardly tactic on the part of the Left. Having failed to convince the people who matter about their political vision, they have resorted to waging a guerilla war in the culture sphere.

Now, I hope it’s obvious from context that I think this is dumb as hell, and I won’t here go into all the reasons why that is.8 One thing that always bothers me about this story, however, is that it has nothing to do with Marxism! As I’ve mentioned over and over again, Marxists are committed to historical materialism and the claim that culture does not drive historical change is about as axiomatic as you can get when it comes to historical materialism (that’s the ‘materialism’ part!). Simply put, Marxists don’t take affecting the way people think through the manipulation of culture to be one of their political goals at all!9 What conservatives are upset about isn’t a Marxist project, but a bourgeois liberal one.10 It’s liberalism and not Marxism that takes seriously the claim that political, historical, and economic change is primarily driven by the beliefs and ideas that people hold, and it is liberalism and not Marxism that places its faith the long arc of history can be bent towards justice through the manipulation of those ideas.

But hold the phone: am I being inconsistent here? Haven’t I been arguing that, on the one hand, Benjamin does really good Marxist analysis, and, on the other hand, have I not just argued that he himself thinks that the interpretation of art is a matter of politics? Is that not precisely the thing that those decrying post-modernist cultural Marxism are worried about?

This point is made by those Conservatives Who Know a Thing or Two and who have some passing familiarity with the history of the post ‘68 New Left campus crusades. These people know, for example, that Marcuse was part of that movement and that he was part of the Frankfurt School. Thus, the link is solidified: here are Marxists who are advocating for culture warfare stuff. Doesn’t all of this have its root here in Benjamin?

The answer is no! But to see why this is the case, we have to see the underlying assumption that’s being made here: namely, that the claim that images/art has to be interpreted and that interpretation is a political matter entails the further claim that truth is relative. That is, that at the end of the day, all interpretations are just a matter of which side can muster the most political/social/economic pressure to their side and that they have nothing to do with the truth of the matter. Now, to be clear, that would take us directly into post-modern territory. But this is not the only way to interpret Benjamin, nor is it an accurate way of reading him.

To see the alternative way of reading the text, we just have to acknowledge the there is such a thing as the truth about certain matters and that some interpretations are better at getting at that truth than others. With Benjamin, then, we can say that, yes, there’s a truth of the matter (about art, images, etc.) and that truth is one that is best revealed through the method of historical materialism.

Here’s a toy example: you can, for example, interpret the difficulties accompanying a health emergency as an unfolding of God’s plan to teach you about the fragility of your body and the ease with which all of your savings can be wiped out overnight. From a historical materialist perspective, this interpretation simply obscures and mystifies the social and economic relations that underlie the situation in question. Rather than showing you that the reason you’re struggling is because you live in a world in which the integrity of your body is something that has to be earned through success in the market, it displaces any political impact that we, collectively have and places it into the realm of individual responsibility, fate, and metaphysical mystery. In other words, the unfolding of reality is a matter of what happens between you and God (and primarily what He decides for you based on your behavior) and everything else is just window dressing. Now, I don’t mean to single out religious literalists here since this kind of thinking is present in other guises in, say, the liberal myth of merit and desert, but it’s just easiest to see its mystifying nature when a supernatural figure is involved.

Crucially, the historical materialist picture is not one of relativity about truth, but is one that takes seriously the claim that there really is one Truth that we’re all subject to and according to which the world operates. This, of course, is the same thing that those who decry Post-Modern Cultural Marxists believe with respect to their ideology, but we should not confuse the fact that different groups of people believe different things about the Truth with the claim that because such a disagreement exists, truth is relative. It would be wild to think that because Evangelical Christians believe such-and-such that differs from what non-religious people believe and that they use political, social, and economic pressures to put their interpretation of it in practice, that therefore, those Christians are relativists about the truth. The same holds for historical materialists: there’s one truth and some interpretations of the world are more closely aligned to it than others.

Thus, when Benjamin says that the interpretation of reality becomes a political matter in the age of mechanical reproduction, he’s not advocating for some position in which truth is so fragmented that the only thing left is pure coercive power. Rather, he is making a not of the inflection point of possibility that the present moment presents and how we are at a crossroads: on the one hand, we can take advantage of the way the cultural means of (re)production have provided us with a path towards getting at the truth and ridding ourselves of mystification, or, on the other hand, we can drift further into that mystification through fascism. There’s nothing post-modern here.

This will become very apparent when we get to the concluding section of the essay. But we’re not even halfway there yet (yikes!)

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Section IV

Benjamin begins by stating that every art work is imbedded in some particular tradition.1 Although the work may remain the same physically, the tradition in which it is imbedded may change radically across time: the very same statue of Venus is at one time venerated by the pagan Greeks and, at a later time, condemned by the Medieval Christians. Nevertheless, despite this difference of tradition, both the Ancient Greeks and Medieval Christians still encountered the vase as an object with an aura, and thus, as something with an ineliminable uniqueness. Tradition does not affect the aura, but the fact that the aura of an artwork is and has always been historically imbedded in a tradition does make a difference. Let’s trace that history.

In the beginning (if there was such a time), Benjamin claims, all art works were originally and intimately connected to ritual, and, as such, had a cultic expression. What exactly Benjamin means here by “cult” and “ritual” (and magic) isn’t obvious, but it’s clear that they’re concepts related to the mystical, the spiritual, and the metaphysical. Given what we know about Benjamin’s commitments to historical materialism, his use of the terms is, I believe, best understood as signaling art’s original proximity to mystifying forces. However, this doesn’t mean that Benjamin thinks that there really is stuff like magic or that the realm of religion speaks to something real that’s beyond the everyday world. Far from it, he is simply drawing our attention to the historical relation between art and these mystifying forces that keep us from understanding our real condition. The implicit claim, then, is that there’s a kind of bleeding effect between the two that makes us associate the mystifying force of magic, religion, and the cult with the uniqueness of the aura. In doing so, Benjamin is positioning himself against folks who might think that, for example, art works are special because they provide us with access to a kind of super-sensory world—whether that be a world of magic, religion, or, in its secular guise, beauty. Such people, we might say, are just confused and are bringing in the original value that art had as an expression of the cultic for the value that art works have tout court.

This, again, is another place where it’s clear that Benjamin doesn’t harbor the romantic notions that some people tend to attribute to him. To lament the loss of the aura is, on this diagnosis, to lament the loss of the cultic value which, to reiterate, is just the loss of a mistaken and incidental relation between a mystifying ideology and art objects. Benjamin says this is clearly seen in the Renaissance’s secular cult of beauty, but to understand what he means by this, we have to dip our toes into a bit of aesthetic intellectual history. I promise, I’ll be brief:

Interlude: From Object to Subject to Form and Art for Art’s Sake

Although this is by no means the only way to present the intellectual history of Western Art, we can tell the following story. Traditionally, the starting point of analysis begins by asking what the function of art is, or, to put it another way, what it is that artists do. Whether this is the best or most important question to ask is something I’ll set to the side for the moment since it gets us into some methodological questions that don’t need to concern us right now.2 Regardless, the first plausible answer given to these questions is that the function of art is to capture an accurate representation of the world and its objects, and that what makes someone a (good) artist is that they engage in that kind of practice. On that view, a good painter, for example, is someone who can paint a bunch of grapes to look like real grapes3, a good playwright is someone who can represent social relations realistically, and so on. In other words, good artists are good mimics of what’s real and who provide us with accurate knowledge of the world.4

This way of thinking about things continued until the Renaissance when advances in technology and science present a challenge to it. Roughly, in light of all sorts of new instruments and tools, the idea that, for example, an artist drawing the human body could give us a better understanding of its workings than, say, a biologist armed with a microscope, becomes untenable. If this is true and one learns the truth about the external world by other, scientific processes, then the unique role of art as a source of knowledge and of the artist as serving a certain social and epistemic function is put into jeopardy.5 In response to this threat, the function of art and the artist had to change accordingly and the commitment to mimetic representation had to be dropped. Rather than holding that art helps us better understand the external world, philosophers and artists now held that its purpose was to tell us about the internal world—the world of psychology, of emotion, and feelings that is forever kept apart from the prodding hands of science. Thus, we see artists of the time turn inward, towards romanticism, psychology, and the expression of emotions.6 On this view, good art helped people feel things, and a good artist was somebody who, for example, was able to take what they felt and could accurately convey their feelings to their audience. Or, barring that, someone who could make their audience feel something they—the artist—intended them to feel.

This view of art is still with us today (as are versions of representationalism). However, it, too, faced some significant challenges. Take, for instance, the claim that a good artist is able to take feelings they have and use their craft to transmit those feelings to their audience. This is a plausible claim: Francis Bacon is good artist because, arguably, he was able to capture and produce a strong sense of anxiety and dread in his audience through his paintings. Furthermore, this seems like something he aimed to do with his paintings. If instead of having this effect, his paintings made us laugh or put us at ease, then it seems that Bacon would have failed in some significant way. The same, of course, is true in other fields. Part of what makes Tommy Wisseau such a bad film director (and writer, and producer) is the fact that he intended to make a gritty drama about betrayal with The Room, and instead ended up making something bizarre and, really, really funny.

Although plausible, it’s worth noting how much of the view hangs on the particular mental states of the artist and the audience. Suppose, for example, that we find Bacon’s diaries and discover that he neither felt any emotion of dread or anxiety when making his paintings, nor did he have any intentions of conveying such feelings to his audience. Does it follow, then, that Bacon is a worse artist because of that? Should his paintings be considered bad by that virtue?

(Pictured: Figure with Meat, 1954)

The answer seems to be no. Rather, it seems reasonable to say that if his paintings are good it is such because of what they are—because of certain facts about them— rather than because of their relation to whatever their author felt while making them or whatever they was intended to do. But if that’s true, then it’s hard to see how (good) art could be a reflection of the inner world any more than it could be a reflection of the outer world. It appears, that the function and value of art is, in some important sense autonomous and independent from both its subject matter (whether it represents something accurately, for example) and from its creator (what the artist intends).

So, what is the function of art? What are artists supposed to do? The answer: nothing—the purpose and value of art is simply to be art (l’art pour l’art), or, in more sophisticated versions, to present significant form divorced from any subject matter or internal state of the artist.7 Once this is accepted, purely abstract art as an object of analysis becomes possible and, if we’re being super charitable, art can be freed from convention and tradition.

The overarching historical transition, then, can be pithily stated as one from external object, to internal subject, to pure form.

In any case, this is more or less how many people view art today, often with a kind of post-modern addition of various different elements from different traditions can all be mixed in together. (My uncharitable summary of post-modernism: “Whatever theory or ideology you have: Yes, all that, but maybe none of it”)

Interlude over! (See, it wasn’t that bad—you’re already reading an essay on art anyway!)

I believe it’s a very compressed version of this history that Benjamin is tracing out in the bulk of the first paragraph of this section, though much quicker than I did in the few paragraphs above and with an emphasis on the attempt of art and artists to remain close to ritual. Thus, we see him telling us that the secular cult of beauty develops as a response to the intellectual, material, and technological changes brought about by the Renaissance, and that this was an attempt to preserve the ritual connection that art originally had. This part of the story maps onto the turn away from representationalism which is completed once photography arrives on the scene as “the first truly revolutionary means of production…simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sense the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later.” The art world then responds to this crisis by developing the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art ), once again, in an attempt to retain the connection between art and ritual.

This [response] gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter.

The development of this “theology of art” maps onto the turn away from the internal sphere towards the purely formal: the art doesn’t have do anything or be about anything. It’s just something special, ephemeral, and other-worldly—pure and grasped solely by a refined aesthetic intuition that takes us closer to beauty (whose intuition? Hmmm…certainly not yours if you don’t have it…).

Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground, so it’s worth bringing things back into focus.

The purpose of this entire discourse—this brief tracing of art history—is twofold: first, it serves to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that art has a particular history that grounds it in all this magical stuff that Marxists generally want to dispose with as explanations for historical phenomena. To reiterate for the umpteenth time, this is just another instance of Benjamin being a Good Marxist and a Good Historical Materialist working in that tradition. Incidentally, making this history explicit also allows us to screen off some potential objections: if, for example, you think of ritual, magic, God, Beauty, etc. as real things and not as mystifications of historical material processes, then you can be certain that your disagreement with Benjamin goes much deeper and meets him at a different level than if you don’t believe this.

If, however, you accept that the original role of art is deeply imbedded in ritual, if you think that its relation to such ritual doesn’t speak for its value or function but is only another mystifying holdover from an earlier time, and if you can see that contemporary ways of looking at art (viz., l’art pour l’art) are just further permutations of this relation, then Benjamin has more to offer you.

Namely—and this is the second purpose of this discourse—it allows you to catch a glimpse at the emancipatory power that mechanical reproduction of art has. Here’s Benjamin in his own words:

For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes to work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.

This is a very important passage that we’ll return to later, but I just want to highlight a couple of things for the moment. First, I want to stress the general thesis that is being developed across these sections: because art has historically been used for ritual, it has developed a strong association—a parasitic relationship—between the aura of art and ritual that gives the impression that the aura itself is magical; mechanical reproduction destroys the very notion of authenticity by destroying its aura, and, in turn, destroys its link to ritual; and by doing this, it reverses the function of art and allows for its emancipatory potential.

The point of reversal is an especially interesting one that we should keep an eye on through the essay, but, as a starting point, it immediately raises the question: what was the function of art such that it is now reversed? The answer to this question is implicit in the quote above: until this point, art’s function (intentionally or not) was to mystify and convince people that there is a world beyond their control. The ritual, cultic world is a world inhabited by powers that we are not in charge of, and is serviced by a group of people who commune with that world, who perform its rites, who know its secrets, and who follow its rules. In other words, it is a world with a bounded inner core of specialists that implies the existence of an outer core of people who do not and cannot engage with it, who must not be allowed in, and who inhabit the ordinary, mundane, material world. By destroying the mystifying function of art with mechanical reproduction—by freeing it from its “parasitical dependence on ritual”—Benjamin thinks we are finally in a position to rid ourselves of this illusion, and, crucially, to see that world as one in which we can do politics. We can, for example, ask who is barred from participating in art and why they’re barred from it. Once we see that this is how art operates, we are also in a position to see that this is how the entire world operates as well. If art can be demystified and shown to be a matter of what we, the ordinary people of the world make of it, then so can the economy.

Finally, it’s also worth stressing just how different Benjamin’s emancipatory vision is from the emancipatory vision of “pure” art that I mentioned earlier. On this, perhaps more standard view, the emancipation comes from being freed from the internal demands and ideas of the art world itself: because the artist is no longer forced to stick to a particular tradition or style (say, depictions of Christ, realistic still-life painting, flat Byzantine mosaics, or whatever) they are free to do whatever they want to do. At the same time, this move places a certain authority on the part of the consumer who is likewise freed from having to engage with the art in its particular context or tradition.8 In other words, this emancipatory picture is one of an opening up of ideas that, as many people think, goes hand in hand of a broader opening up of all sorts of thought, and which simply comes with modernity, rationalism, democratization, and, of course, a liberalized economy.

Benjamin’s picture of emancipation is very different. It, too, acknowledges a break from a traditional way of thinking about art, but, crucially, that break is not driven by a fundamental change in ideas, but, of course, by a change in the means of its (re)production. What mechanical reproduction can free us from is the way art has been parasitically bound to ritual—to the mystical and magical things that obscure the true relations in the world—and not simply from the specific ideas about what art can and can’t be. The former is a much broader phenomenon than the latter and it can be seen by the fact that, as Benjamin has pointed out, one can still be deep in the throes of mysticism while being freed from a particular tradition. Indeed, the charge implicit in his criticism of the l’art pour l’art movement as a theology of art is precisely that it still mystifies because it is unable to break the link with ritual. This difference is key in understanding what follows.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. (How did two paragraphs spawn this whole thing? This reading series is getting out of hand…)

Section V

This section presents us with the very important distinction between the cult value and exhibition value of art objects. The cult value of an art object is to be understood in terms of the object’s relation to some specific cultic, animist, or pagan spiritual practices. In other words, there are certain art objects whose value depends on it being a part of such a ritual and not because it could be seen by people. Thus:

The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.

This kind of value is still to be found in certain religious contexts:

Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella;9 certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level.

Now, it’s clear that Benjamin is making some substantial empirical claims, the validity of which I’m not in a position to assess. Frankly, I don’t know if it’s true that cave paintings were instruments of magic and I’m not convinced that Benjamin knew either. I’m sure that there may have been very complex reasons for why “the man of the Stone Age” would have painted elk on the walls of his cave, some of which might not reduce to a belief in magic or communing with the spirits (maybe he just liked elk!).

Modern anthropologists, archeologists, and art historians would be better positioned to answer this particular question and it’s very possible that Benjamin is just wrong about cave paintings. Nevertheless, it’s important to note the scope and strength of his claim. On the one hand, it appears to be an important one since it’s an important part of the history that Benjamin wants to tell about the development of art. On the other hand, however, the particular specifics are not terribly important because they’re only meant to illustrate what it means for an art work to have a cult value. If we can make sense of the person who paints elk on the walls of their cave not to show others what they’ve done, but as part of some ritual, then we have a grasp of what Benjamin has in mind. Furthermore, as his Christian examples point out, we know that people have made art works precisely for this purpose, so it’s not that big of a stretch to imagine that people did so in the past. And, of course, we know from the archeological record that even if cave paintings in particular weren’t involved in ritual, there are plenty of other cases in which art and ritual go hand-in-hand (think ceremonial daggers and whatnot).

From that perspective, the point is made. But let’s not let Benjamin off the hook just yet. As I mentioned, the kinds of claims he makes here are important because they’re not supposed to just tell a hypothetical story of how art develops, but its actual story. To put the point more forcefully, Benjamin is in the process of telling us how art begins with an emphasis on the cultic value and how changes in the means of (re)production cause it to shift to the exhibition value which we see today. If it’s simply not true that art begins that way, then a different story must be told. And, again, I’m not sure whether Benjamin’s story is correct.10

In any case, the story continues:

With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it.

Here’s a wonderful illustration of how the change in art (re)production leads to change in how people relate to art. Originally, again, art works are tied to their cultic value: here is a statue for the Temple of Aphrodite—it rests in in that temple and one must go to that temple to see it; there is a Byzantine mosaic of Christ and the Disciples, built into the wall of the basilica; etc. Those are fixed entities that have a definite place because of their relation to ritual; they exhibit a primarily cultic value. As art becomes free from this grip (it’s unclear how this emancipation proceeds, but it’s reasonable to say that for Benjamin it, too, is driven by certain material forces), it becomes possible to make individual portraits on canvas, little busts of so-and-so, etc.11 And because there are new ways of producing and transporting art works, they are able to circulate and, thus, to have an exhibition value.

Okay, but what is the exhibition value of a work? Simply put, the exhibition value of a work of art is to be understood in contrast with the cultic value: whereas cultic value is found in the exclusivity of access to the work—in the ways in which it is hidden from view because of its relation to magic—the exhibition value is to be found in its accessibility to the masses.

I admit, why this should be the case—why exhibition value should be a value at all—is still opaque to me. However, the general idea is an illustration of Hegel’s/Marx’s claim that “merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.”12 The merely quantitative difference with respect to art is quite literally how many reproductions can be made of the artwork; the qualitative change is the change in the nature of the work itself. To put it in even simpler terms: when there is only one copy of a work of art that has its bespoke place in the mystified world of ritual from which I am kept out, then I relate to that art work in one way: I present myself before it, I subject myself to its aura, I enter its magical world. As more and more copies can be made of that very same object, it changes and my relationship to it changes as well: now it enters my house, now it’s available on my phone, it submits to me rather than the other way around. Before it can be reproduced in this way, it has one function: to aid magic. Once it can be reproduced this way it has a new function: to please me. These are not the same functions.

We see Benjamin making this point as follows:

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to the such an extent that the qualitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature.

He continues:

This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the on we are conscious of, the artistic function, may be recognized as incidental.

This is important, once again, for seeing the emancipatory vision Benjamin has in mind. Just as previously, because of the emphasis on the special place that a work of art has in relation to ritual, a work may not have been seen as art,13 so, too, what may be primarily seen as having the function of art today may really have a different function. What function, you ask? Politics, of course. And where should we look for this new function? In the art form that is most reproducible and hence, the most on the way towards changing its qualitative nature: photography and film.

I want to make one final point that I couldn’t quite figure out how to fit into the overall narrative, but which I found myself struggling with as I was writing. Namely, it’s important to note that the cultic and exhibition values that Benjamin talks about are not exclusive in the sense that something either had exhibition value or cult value. It’s quite clear that what he’s talking about are accents or emphases of value with different works, but that can be easy to miss. Given that we’re talking about emphases, there are clearly going to be cases in the middle where these two values are both on display. A good example of this is the Mona Lisa.

According to this Guardian article from 2019, an estimated 30,000 people come in daily just to see this painting and take a selfie in front of it. Clearly, it seems that the painting has some exhibition value, and indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons it is so popular is because one the reasons to see the Mona Lisa is to have seen it. At the same time, however, the painting itself doesn’t move (much)—one still has to meet it in Paris, behind its bulletproof covering, flanked by security. It’s not much of a stretch to say that the “ritual” to which it belongs is that of “going to Paris” with this being one of the stations one passes through in that ritual. Furthermore, people are still very much enamored by this ritual and, in particular, to the aura that the painting exhibits—it’s not enough for me to pull up the painting on my phone and tell you that it looks exactly the same and unlike at the museum, you can spend as much time looking at it in as great detail as you want without any French person telling you to move along. You won’t buy it because you’ll want to be in its presence.

Why do I bring this up? Because, given some of the discussion of forgeries and reproductions in the previous sections, and given the way we tend to think about art, the examples that might immediately spring to mind (and the examples I’ve used in these discussions for the very same purpose) are of canvas paintings and statues. These are, of course, art works, so they are in the scope of Benjamin’s analysis. However, the emancipatory vision that Benjamin has is not about the reproduction of those works of art, but, I believe, of those art practices which produce works whose entire function is to be reproduced. This is why the vast majority of discussion from now on will focus on photography and especially film and won’t be about, for example, how reproductive technologies can help us make fantastic forgeries of the Masters. Those works, recall, still have an aura and a history against which authenticity is determined and preserved. By contrast, films and photographs do not. From jump, they are things made to be reproduced: there is no “original” Taxi Driver or Migrant Mother (see below), only different prints of it.

Keep all this in mind or else things tend to get confusing.