Socialist Reading Series II: Walter Benjamin [Part 1]
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Preface and Section 1
A Brief Intro:
Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve done an installment of this series! The last and only installment on Lenin’s The State and Revolution was from a couple of years ago (back when I was posting stuff on Blogspot), and while I think I’ve changed my mind on quite a lot of things about that piece in particular, it’s nice that I was able to write them down as I was thinking them so I can see how my thinking has changed over time.
For this installment, I want to do things a bit differently since the work that I’ll be discussing (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) is one that I’ve read and taught before. Consequently, what you read won’t be my initial reactions to the text as I work my way through it, but rather, my best attempt to explain a paper that I already think is fantastic. Furthermore, I won’t be splitting things up into “synopsis” and “analysis” sections as I did before, but will be doing some kind of mix of both. I’ll mostly be working from notes I put together for the aesthetics class I taught this spring, covering only a couple of sections at a time to keep things manageable. You should feel free to read along with the PDF linked above, and, of course, if any questions arise, feel free to let me know.1
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention John Berger’s phenomenal BBC series “Ways of Seeing” of which episode one is a recapitulation of this essay. I can’t aspire to do what Berger does there, so don’t hold me to that standard, but if something I say is unclear, it is possible that Berger will make it clearer.
Preface:
Walter Benjamin was a Marxist. In many respects he was an unusual Marxist, but he was, nevertheless a Marxist. As such, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (TWA) is a piece of Marxist literature, and, specifically, a bit of historical materialist analysis. It must be read this way in order to be understood. In this preface, Benjamin is letting us know that he is aligning himself with Marx’s methodology and expanding on his work.
This is very important, but because Benjamin is so economical in his writing and because the only explicit mention to Marx is here in the preface (“Marx” and any variation thereof appears only in the first two sentences of the essay!), it is easy to miss. Such a reading is further encouraged by the fact that the preface seems to suggest a kind of break with Marx. In essence, one might think of Benjamin as pointing out something that Marx wasn’t able to do by virtue of the limitations of his theory, and to see Benjamin as trying to fill in those theoretical gaps. But this isn’t the case and there is no break here. Rather, what Benjamin is pointing out to us is precisely that if one accepts Marxism as correct, then one shouldn’t expect to be able to do the kind of work that Benjamin is now taking on until a sufficient amount of time has passed. And this is precisely because changes in the superstructure lag behind changes in the base. Thus, Benjamin is picking up Marx’s work at a time when it is possible to further it, not separating himself from it.
But let’s slow down a second because we’ve seen some technical terms that might be puzzling for people who aren’t familiar with Marxist philosophy and which will make my point clearer: namely, “base” and “superstructure.”2 These are common enough that it's worth spending a few paragraphs on them.
Broadly speaking, in Marxist philosophy, the base refers to the means of production—i.e., the tools, factories, machines, and materials needed to make stuff—and the relations of production—i.e., how the people who make stuff are organized when making that stuff (e.g., does one person own the machines while others work on them or does everyone collectively own them, does one person decide what is produced while others execute their orders, etc.). By contrast, the “superstructure” refers to everything else that makes up social life that isn’t directly tied to production: art, culture, religion, ideology, politics, the media, and so on. In even simpler terms: there’s the stuff that’s concerned with material goods (food, clothes, shelter, desks, TVs, and cars), and there’s the stuff that’s concerned with intellectual or “spiritual” goods. The base is the former, the superstructure is the latter. Any given society that produces anything at all will have both a base and a superstructure and the division is, in the first place, a way of distinguishing between and drawing attention to when we’re talking about the social activities that involves the day-to-day material reproduction of that society (the base) and when we’re talking about some other social phenomenon not directly related to those activities.
As the terminology suggests, the base/superstructure model is a hierarchical one and it is natural to read it as a strictly so in the sense that the superstructure both rests on and is entirely determined by what happens at the base.3 This, in turn, suggests a kind of “vulgar” interpretation of the model in which all changes in the superstructure (say, religious practices) are due to changes in the base and that no such changes can occur unless there’s some kind of corresponding preceding change in the base. Such an interpretation also often leads people to erroneously think that Marx held that everything belonging to the superstructure to be entirely epiphenomenal or irrelevant and that the base is the only thing that matters. This is inaccurate both empirically and as an interpretation of Marx and the model is best understood as dialogical (in the sense that the two are in a kind of “dialogue” with one another) rather than as straightforwardly determinant. In other words, the superstructure can have an effect on the base and vice versa.
Nevertheless, it is true that in Marxist philosophy the base and superstructure do not have, as it were, equal standing such that the base is taken to be predominant and is usually the main focus of analysis. So, how do we square the rejection of the vulgar reading with the preservation of the hierarchical structure of the model?
I think the easiest way to do so is to think of the base/superstructure model as providing coarse grained explanations of certain phenomena rather than fine grained ones. What it tells us is not that every change in, say, culture, will be explained by a corresponding change in the economy, but that all big changes will be (think: The Reformation and the invention of the printing press). Thus, for example, if you want to explain why boy bands of the 90’s and 2000’s focused so much on love and fidelity, you’re not necessarily going to refer to the ways in which factories operated at that time. That’s too fine grained of a phenomenon in the superstructure to be captured by the base and there are other, more proximate explanations that will do the job. However, if you wanted to know why it was possible for mass music to be viable at all, then you should look at, for example, the changing developments in music technology over the 20th’s century (e.g., literally the development of the machines used to make studio recordings, who had access to those machines, who operated them, etc.) and what effects those changes had in what products were put out.
Okay, let’s get back to Benjamin since what has been said finally lets us understand why he says that it is only now possible to explore the transformations in the superstructure as a result of the changes in the base. In particular, if there was a big change in the base, then it will take time before such a change can be seen in the superstructure. And we know that there was such a change—the capitalist mode of production had just become dominant when Marx was writing—so, after “more than half a century” we are in a position to understand how those changes have taken place. Far from being a break with Marx, Benjamin is picking up where the former left off. This means that he is not just paying a kind of empty lip service nor criticizing the general methodology, but, as mentioned above, Benjamin takes himself to be continuing his work.
Moving on, it is also important thing to note is that Benjamin intends to provide his analysis as a weapon against Fascism. Holding true to the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”), he doesn’t just want to engage in a purely intellectual exercise, but wants his work to be useful “for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” This not only shows that Benjamin understood the assignment, as it were, but (incidentally) also shows that he doesn’t subscribe to the vulgar view alluded to above: the superstructure can have an effect on the base since it can allow for the formulation of revolutionary demands, which, in turn, quite clearly are directed at the base.
Still, a natural question arises: how can an analysis of art be a weapon against Fascism? The full answer to this question is, of course, to be found in the rest of the essay and is most explicitly offered in its concluding paragraphs. However, Benjamin provides us with one important and suggestive passage that, I believe, gives us a preliminary answer to that question:
[The theses relating to the developmental tendencies of art] brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism.
What this passage tells us is that Benjamin holds that the application of certain concepts leads to “a processing of data in the Fascist sense” and that (at least some of) these concepts include “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.” To think of art in terms of these concepts is to already be disposed to view to world—to process data—in the Fascist sense. But why is that? I believe it’s because such concepts serve two functions: first, they serve as kinds of mystifications that turn what are social relations into metaphysical entities. To think of art in terms of creativity and genius is to think that there is some quality out there—genius—that one possesses or communes with and which is the source of what makes that art or the artist good. Furthermore, it is a mysterious thing over which we have little control and which is certainly not determined by anything that we do—ya either got it or ya don’t!
Second, and very much for the same reason, these concepts also tend to structure the world in the hierarchical fashion that is the lingua franca (lingua Franco?) of Fascism. Some people just happen to have genius or creativity while others don’t; some people exhibit the eternal values and others are incapable of doing so; some people are specially ordained by God and others are cursed by Him; some people belong to the superior race or nation and others are degenerate; and so on. Crucially, because these concepts are, as it were, out there and independent of the social relations over which we have control, there’s nothing to be done about the matter but “accept the facts.”
In both respects, such concepts serve to mask the actual relations between people which make it possible or unlikely for certain talents to be developed. Thus, people operating with them tend to ignore that, for example, whether one has genius or is creative is a matter of what institutions place value on one’s work, or that the exhibition of ‘genius’ seems to oddly break by class lines (how many genius slaughterhouse workers are there compared to genius children of famous actors or artists?). Consequently, they fail to see the horizons of possibility and the alternative ways in which the world could be arranged differently.
By contrast, what Benjamin is going to do for us is provide us with the antidote to this way of thinking. As such, we should conceptualize the rest of the paper as a process of demystification. Indeed, I think it’s reasonable to think that Benjamin takes himself to be doing the same kind of work that Marx did in demystifying the nature of the commodity. Commodities are not fetishes whose value inheres in them independently of us and which only some select few are capable of obtaining, but quite the opposite—their value is always and necessarily a product of the social relations of which we collectively have control. Likewise, art is not something that is inherently valuable because it was made by a genius, because it has a special history, or because it exhibits some kind of aura independently of us, but only appears to us as such because other factors obscure the social relations underlying its (re)production. To understand this about art is to resist the backslide into Fascism, and thus, to raise our weapons against it.
Now, let’s see how this is supposed to be done
Section I:
We begin with the fact that although in theory art has always been reproducible, the era of mechanical reproduction—the era to which we still belong (or, if we consider digital reproduction to be non-mechanical, the era from which we have recently departed)—is something new.
This is not to say that there weren’t certain pseudo-mechanical means of reproducing art in the past. The Greeks, for example, relied on stamping and founding (pouring of molten metals into molds) to make certain reproductions. But that way of reproducing art mechanically was limited to those methods. With the advent of woodcuts and movable type, we got another means of reproducing works of art, but it wasn’t until lithography that we entered into the age of mechanical reproduction.
Why? As Benjamin puts it “This much more direct process…permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing.” (pg. 2) Thus, what makes lithography special seems to be: 1) the relative increase in the quantity of prints that could be made from a plate; 2) the relative cheapness of the process (after all, daily creation of plates can’t be accomplished if the process is an expensive one); 3) its ability to represent “everyday life.”
Now, I’ve never worked with prints before, so it’s not clear to me why what seems to hold for lithographs doesn’t also hold for woodcuts. Presumably, once one has a finished woodcut in hand, one can make hundreds of different prints from that design as easily as one can with a lithograph. Likewise, it seems that rate at which different woodprints could be made and the content of what they depict is less a function of the medium than of the artist, but I could be wrong. I can imagine that a print made by chemical process is perhaps more accurate to its source (i.e., the plate) than a similar print made by ink and wood, but that’s just speculation on my part. In any case, the specifics of lithography and woodprints need not concern us for too long since lithographs are quickly replaced by photography and photography is a game changer.4
Crucially, with the advent of photography, use of the hand is no longer the primary means by which a piece is reproduced. That is, one doesn’t have to draw or carve what one sees, but one is now free to record what one sees directly through the exposure of light-sensitive chemicals and a camera obscura. This process also allowed us for the first time in history to have artifacts that look exactly like the real things they sought to represent. Of course, there had always been attempts to reproduce reality as closely as possible before, but in every instance prior to the development of photography, representation was always mediated through the hand and, crucially, through the mind of the artist. This was no longer the case—now it was the very light bouncing from the objects themselves that was harnessed to do the work and the hand (and mind, to a certain extent) was freed to do other things.
With the introduction of film and the accompanying addition of sound, technological advances allowed us to experience things that not only looked and sounded like the real things, but which played out in real time. Both of these things will be important later. So far so good.
Here, it’s worth pausing to talk a little bit about the structure of the essay since one might reasonably read this first section and come away puzzled: what am I supposed to get out of this? In essence, it looks as though Benjamin is just making us aware that there had been different ways of reproducing art in the past and that now we find ourselves in a particular moment in history. This is fine, but it appears as just some statements of fact and not the development of a thesis or the presentation of an argument.
In one sense, that’s correct—this section involves just the tracing out of a particular practice (reproduction of art) and no argument is being made just yet (at least not the kind that is usually seen in philosophy papers or books). Many of the sections that we will cover in the future have this kind of structure. In another sense, however, something very subtle is happening through this framing. The first and most important thing is that Benjamin is drawing our attention to a production process and the changes in technology that alter that production process. As such, he is focusing exclusively on the material elements of the artistic process and how those material changes lead to first quantitative changes (e.g., we could make more lithographic prints than woodcut prints and cheaper too) and, eventually to qualitative ones (stay tuned). By contrast, he is not focusing on the particular ideas that were typical of folks who used woodcuts and how those ideas changed over time. In doing this, he’s drawing our attention to the historical development of the production and reproduction of art and making us pay attention to the fact that such a history exists in the first place. This is no small matter since, generally speaking, one of the most natural things that we tend to do as people is to assume that the world as we know it has pretty much always been the same.5
The second, related thing that Benjamin is doing is situating us in time and space by giving us this history. At the time of his writing, we find ourselves in a world in which there are mass produced pictures, films, and sounds (both in the form of radio and talkies). This is a world that is shaped by the history of the development of these technologies that preceded it, and is thus not independent of those developments, but it is still, nevertheless, a different world from the one that came before it and is a world in which different things are possible. We live in this world and are familiar with its workings at the present, but may not be fully aware of what exactly we are familiar with, nor may we fully realize how drastic the shift is between the world prior to photography and the world as it appears afterwards.
Thus, although there is no explicit thesis that is identifiable in this first section, serious philosophical work is being done, and part of the challenge of seeing the overarching argument of the essay is to keep all of these separate pieces together. Indeed, as one reads one might get the impression that there’s a kind of stuttering effect at play in which each section seems to “start over” and cover similar ground from a different perspective. I believe this is intentional, but I think the urge to conclude that Benjamin is repeating himself should be resisted—it’s when that urge is indulged that one tends to miss very important parts of the picture he’s trying to present us. I think these points will become more obvious as we go through more sections, but it’s worth keeping this in mind since the structure of the essay can also be a challenge.
Okay, so much for now. Stay tuned for more!
If the link goes down, I’m working with the Harry Zohn 1936 English translation of the essay. At the time of writing, at least, there are many, many different free PDFs of the essay.
Things get much more complicated than the brief description I’ve offered here. Those who are interested in the details and who want a more sophisticated, analytical framing of the base/superstructure model and what it involves should look at G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense for a sympathetic account and Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx for a slightly less sympathetic one.
This is the sense in which the penthouse of a hotel rests on and is only possible because there’s a foundation to the hotel.
I suspect that there is also some carryover between the chemical processes used in lithography and those used in the initial developments of photography and daguerreotypes but I haven’t done any research into the topic.
Analytic philosophy is perhaps the greatest offender in this respect. When done badly, it simply starts with the assumption that concepts and ideas are ahistorical and because they are such, what appears to us in the present as obvious is what has always been the case. In other cases—and this may be even worse than what was just mentioned—it acknowledges that there has been a historical development, but assumes that all such development was building up to the present. In that respect, people were always budding capitalists, but couldn’t quite get things right until some time in the 1700’s.