Discover more from The Crumb Dungeon

This blog is mostly intended as a place to store my writings about things that have nothing to do with my philosophical work.

Socialist Reading Series II: Walter Benjamin [Part 2]

Sections II-III

Pavel Nitchovski

May 30, 2023

Alright, let’s just get into it—you’ve read Part 1, so you know how this goes. Here’s your link for reading along if you don’t have it pulled up already.

Section II

The following sections are of great importance because they introduce the crucial concept of an artwork’s “aura” and how it’s affected by shifts in reproduction. In my experience, this is where most people end up struggling, so I want to be very careful in my exposition.

Benjamin begins by drawing our attention to something that every reproduction—even a perfect one—lacks: namely, “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” This might seem puzzling since, in one sense, everything has a presence in time and space. After all, the fact that this card on the table was produced by lithograph, or that the film we saw yesterday was printed on celluloid doesn’t mean that either object is somehow outside of time and space. The card is on the table now and the movie was screened in the theater yesterday; as objects, they can’t possibly lack what Benjamin says they lack.

The key here, of course, is that they don’t lack these things as objects, but as reproductions. In other words, what cannot be reproduced is the original object’s presence in time and space.

Consider, for example, an original painting—say, Egon Schiele’s “The Embrace”—and a reproduction of that same painting (like the one below).

What makes this reproduction that you’re seeing different from the actual painting in the Belvedere Palace? It’s clear that the difference between the two is not that this one looks different from the original. Setting aside the fact that it’s much smaller and displayed on your computer screen rather than in a museum, this reproduction looks exactly like the original.

The way in which this one differs from the original is by virtue of its physical history. The original might, for example, have been painted on an old canvas that had some early sketches on it; the paint used may have been mixed with pigments that only come from a certain region in the world; it might have been owned by a Duke before being donated to a charity, and then given to a museum; and so on. This history can be discovered by doing all sorts of physical and chemical analyses on the paintings or tracing the ownership certificates or whatever.

Indeed, it is by appealing to these kinds of differences that we establish which of two identical looking paintings is an authentic one and which one is a very good forgery. If, for example, we find that one of the paintings uses a kind of paint that wasn’t invented until after the artist died, then we know that that one can’t possibly be the original one regardless of how much it looks like it.

This much is obvious for manual reproductions. When a manual reproduction confronts its source material, its history ultimately gives it away as a forgery and the original retains its status as authentic. As such, the original keeps its authority since it is by reference to it that the other looks the way it does.

However, Benjamin tells us what is true for manual reproductions isn’t the case for technical reproductions for two reasons. First, he says, this process “is more independent of the original than manual reproduction.” And second, “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original in situations which would be out of reach for the original itself.” Let’s look each of these in turn.

In what sense is a mechanical reproduction more independent of the original than a manual one? Benjamin gives us two examples:

For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.

Now all this is fine and well. Yes, the camera can capture things that the eye cannot—it can perfectly capture the things that an artist, working by hand, might miss or which they might capture inaccurately. Likewise, with the help of different lenses, the camera can capture things from really far away, slow things down (on film), and so on. The human eye cannot do that. But why does this ability make the mechanical reproduction more independent of the original? That still remains puzzling. Let me put it another way: regardless of whether I’m painting my dog or taking a picture of my dog, both works are equally dependent on the original since both depend on my dog! Neither of the things that Benjamin mentions seems to have anything to do with dependence.

I’ll be frank, I’m a bit puzzled here and I’m not sure I have the decisive reading, but let’s work through some options. One possibility is that “the original” doesn’t refer to the source of which a reproduction is a copy, but to something else. However, the only thing that I can think of that would make sense here is that “the original” refers to “the artist.” On that reading, the mechanical process is more independent of the original since the final product doesn’t have to go through or be mediated by the (imperfect) eye/mind/hand of the artist. Thus, instead of the end result being dependent on what the artist sees and how they translate what they see into a final product via their hand, it relies on the features of the machinery instead. This isn’t the case for manual reproductions where there’s (usually) a clear path between the object, the eye, and the hand. Now, that makes sense of the two examples that Benjamin uses, but it just doesn’t make sense given the language—I just can’t see how “the original” can have that referent.

A second, perhaps more plausible option is that the copy done by mechanical reproduction is more independent of the original of which it is a copy (rather than the original qua subject matter) than the one that is done by hand. This can be tricky since both an “original” painting and a reproduction can have the same “ultimate” source on which they both depend. With my dog, the original for both my painting of him and my photo of him is just Ted, the dog. This leads us to think that “the original” refers to the subject matter of both pieces. However, notice what happens if we switch to talking about “The Embrace.” There, too, we might say, there’s an original subject matter—the particular couple that Schiele painted. However, there might not be any such “original.” Schiele may very well just have imagined this scene rather than observing it. In that case, we can still speak of “the original” as “the-original-painting.” Now, suppose that we wanted to make a copy of that. If we do it by hand, then we have to have it in front of us and we have to rely on it in order to make a copy. Thus, this manual reproduction depends greatly on a relation to a sustained contact with the original painting. By contrast, if we do it by taking a picture (or by using some other mechanical process), then our reliance on the painting is minimal. Instead, we rely on the internal features of the camera, its lens, the film, etc. As such, the use of the camera gives us more independence from the source material.

I think this must be what Benjamin means, but his examples still feel really awkward as illustrations of independence. To go back to my original problem, in what way is a painting of my dog or a painting of a painting of my dog less dependent on its original than a photo of my dog? I think the only answer is that the two differ in terms of how long contact must be sustained with an original. In manual reproduction, we have to keep sustained and maintained contact with the original (my dog or “The Embrace”); with mechanical reproduction, we only need a split second (or, for older cameras, a couple of second) for some special chemicals to be exposed to light. Is this a plausible reading of a dependence relation? Well, maybe… Suppose that x requires more prolonged contact with y than z—does it then follow that z is more independent of y than x? I think in some cases, yes. That’s the best I can do with this puzzle.

But let’s not lose sight of the broader point: Benjamin’s claim is simply that the shift to mechanical reproduction changes something about the how we perceive its authenticity and its authority. In the first place (interpretive questions aside), mechanical reproduction affects the dependence relation between a reproduction and its original. And in the second place, it puts copies in places where the original cannot be.

This second part is much easier to understand. The original art work—whether an oil painting, a choral production, a play, etc.—is usually in only one place at a time. Before the age of mechanical reproduction, if you wanted to see a work of art—say, “The Mona Lisa” or a production of “Hamlet”—you had to travel to the place where the work was on display. However, once we start making mechanical reproductions of these works, the work can travel to us. After the invention of photography, for example, I don’t have to travel to France to see “The Mona Lisa” or to London to see “Hamlet,” but can purchase a cheap print or VHS of it and literally bring it to my house. Not only so, but I can blow up the image, cut it up, isolate just her smile, and frame a 12 ft banner of it above my mantle. We’ll return to this point about the manipulability in a few sections.

“But, Pavel,” you might say, “there’s a difference between your poster of ‘The Mona Lisa’ and the real thing that’s at the Louvre!” Quite right—Benjamin agrees. This is because, as he pointed out at the beginning of this section, the one thing that even a perfect reproduction cannot touch is the original’s presence in time and space. That cannot be reproduced, and since the presence of the original is “the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” no mechanically reproduced object has authenticity. Thus, every mechanically reproduced object appears to us as depreciated or less authentic. In short, presence in time and space is necessary to have authenticity, and because authenticity and historical testimony are so closely bound up together, a lack of presence in time and space will be a threat to both authenticity and historical testimony.

To make things simpler, we can just say that what’s lost in the end is the work’s ‘aura’ In other words, what’s different between the Real “Mona Lisa” and the poster of it hanging up in my room is that the former has an ‘aura’ and the latter does not; the former is reproduced within the object of tradition, the latter is within the object of mechanization; the former is unique, the latter is one of millions of identical copies.

This is stressed in a very interesting passage:

By making many reproductions [the technique of mechanical reproduction] substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in its own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements.

Perhaps the most important thing to note about this passage is that the shattering of tradition that’s the result of the process of mechanical reproduction is a renewal of mankind, and that this renewal goes hand in hand with mass movements. This is one of the key passages that shows that the loss of aura is not something regrettable for Benjamin, but something good.

Many of my former students took Benjamin to be lamenting the loss of the aura as something that is taken away from us with the introduction of mass politics and with mechanical reproduction. This is not an unreasonable assumption to make given the standard critiques of commodification which frequently link mass production with a decline in a commodity’s quality, and explain the latter as due to a loss in craftsmanship. One can see this with certain small businesses which advertise the goods they sell as bespoke or artisanal or hand-crafted. The implication is, of course, that because this bedframe was hand-carved and not pressed through a machine it must be of higher quality than what you might buy in some big store. The hand-crafted bed frame is unique, with a special history that speaks to its quality and which warrants the higher price it seeks on the market. By contrast, the IKEA bedframe is one of millions, made cheaply in some third-world country, lacking anything special about it and hence deserving the low price you can buy it at. This, of course, is all just a bit of mystification.

However, if one has this kind of mystified view in mind about commodities, and if, at the same time, one thinks of Benjamin’s analysis as a criticism of art becoming commodified, then it’s natural to think that the same thing is happening with art as is happening with other goods. In other words, it’s natural to think that Benjamin is saying that by being mass-produced, artworks are losing their aura, losing their authenticity, and hence, making us worse off than we were in the age of manual reproductions.

This is all reasonable, but it just doesn’t fit in with passages like these. Here, Benjamin is clearly celebrating the shattering of tradition as a path towards the revival of mankind. There is no lamentation here and no yearning for some golden past in which painters did their work by hand. Again, this makes perfect sense if you read Benjamin as a Marxist and if you read his analysis of the aura as a parallel to Marx’s own analysis of commodity fetishism. Just as it would be the biggest mistake in the world to think that in providing that analysis Marx is lamenting the loss of something special—the magic that objects appeared to have—so it would be an equally big mistake to think of Benjamin regretting the loss of the aura. Far from it, the realization that there is no aura is the first step necessary for liberation. Just how that is supposed to work out will be covered later.

Now, before we move on to the next section I want to raise an interpretive question that I think is of absolute importance. Consider what Benjamin says here:

The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and of course, not only technical reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was always branded as a forgery, the original preserved its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction.

The natural reading of this passage is that unlike manual reproduction, when confronted with mechanical reproduction, the original does not preserve its authority. But why should that be the case? Why does the mechanically reproduced copy precipitate a crisis of authority for the original of which it is a copy?

Consider, again, the original “Mona Lisa,” a perfect manual reproduction of the same painting, and the mechanically reproduced poster of it tacked up on the wall. We bring our reproductions to confront the original. When the manual reproduction confronts the original, we subject both to a chemical, physical, and historical analysis and determine that one is a forgery and the other is authentic. So far, so good. But now we make my poster confront the original and…? Isn’t the same thing supposed to happen, just much, much faster? In other words, aren’t we in a position here in which we don’t have to do much of anything to establish which is the real painting and which is a copy of it? If that’s the case, then why wouldn’t the original retain its authority as authentic instead of losing it?

Here’s the best I can do. The difference between the manual reproduction and the poster is that the label of ‘forgery’ can only plausibly be applied to one and not the other. Nobody who sees the poster would think that it’s trying to be the “Mona Lisa” but that is reasonable to conclude from the manual reproduction. In that respect, the manual reproduction is aiming at capturing the original’s authenticity, and that, as we know, cannot be done. However, by virtue of aiming to reproduce it and failing, it confirms that there’s something important about the original that grants it a higher status. By contrast, the mechanical reproduction makes no such pretense. All viewers immediately know that the poster is not the original and that it isn’t aiming to be the original. Crucially, by never bringing this into question—by acknowledging that it has nothing to do with authenticity—it serves to undermine the very importance of that authenticity.

It’s as if the poster says: “Yes, I’m aware that I’m different from the original even though I look exactly like it. You say I’m not authentic and you think this is because I lack some magical property that the original has—the aura! You’re right. I don’t have that. But ask yourself: why does the aura matter? What does it do?”

This is, of course, the crucial question, the answer to which is to be developed in the remainder of the essay.

Section III

This section begins with another Marxist thesis: “the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.” What does this mean? In short, it is a statement of the base/superstructure claim that we discussed in part I: humanity’s material mode of existence—the means by which humanity reproduces itself—precedes the way in humanity understands the world around it.

This is followed by a short illustration of how this proceeded with art over the centuries and the limitations of previous analyses that came close to the same phenomenon. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert on art history during this (or any other) time, so I have very little to unpack from Benjamin’s sparse remarks.

Regardless, the most important thing to note of here is the claim that previous analyses missed the “social transformations expressed by these changes of perception” and that Benjamin is going to trace these for us with respect to the current shift in perception that he outlined in section II. In other words, what we are experiencing in the age of mechanical reproduction is the loss or decay of the art work’s aura, and Benjamin is going to explain the social causes—the changes of mode of existence—of that shift.

This brings us back to the aura. We can speak of not only “historical objects” (i.e., artifacts, commodities, art works) as having an aura, but also of “natural” objects. For Benjamin, the aura of the natural object is a spatial one:

We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.

This is one of the moments in which one wishes Benjamin was less economical in his writing because it’s hard to see the importance of this passage. At first blush, it appears only as if Benjamin is stating a platitude: things appear to us in space. This is, of course, part of what he’s saying, but there’s a bit more to it. Crucially, the way that the aura of a natural object appears to us—its distance from us—appears to us as something that is an established fact of nature. There is the mountain: I see that it is far away from me—it is there and I am here. The relation between the two of us is a fixed and immediately obvious one that is baked into the very perception I have of it. In other words, it is not as if I first perceive the mountain and then perceive its distance; to perceive it at all is to perceive it at a distance relative to me. Furthermore, if I want to reduce that distance, some work has to be done—either Muhammad will go to the mountain or the mountain will have to come to Muhammad. This is the mode of perception as it applies to natural objects.

Now here comes the twist. Society in the early 20th century (and beyond) is marked by a certain change in social relations in which the masses are significant. In what way? Perhaps the easiest way that I can think to illustrate this is by vague allusions to Foucault and the rise of “public health.” We know that at a certain point prior to, say, the French Revolution, there was no such thing as a public concern for health. There was, of course, a concern for different individuals’ health and a concern with how one gets over an illness, what the best care for someone who’s sick might be, and so on, but nothing on a massive scale. To put it another way, feudal dukes weren’t coordinating with each other about the best measures necessary to put in place in order to keep the plague from spreading from one demesne to another. All that changes when new technologies in production bring more and more people into cities. Suddenly, there are thousands (or tens of thousands) of people living in one place and it becomes absolutely imperative that if life is to continue, one has to start thinking about how groups or masses of people will live together. With that, the masses become a unit of analysis and, among other things, we start getting the divisions between those who are “sick” or a threat to the public health and those who are “healthy” and who make the city stronger. So much for Foucault. The important thing to note here is that, in the first place, there is a general social shift that allows us to look at the world at the level of the masses, and, in the second place, that such a shift has (or can be given) a material explanation.

Along with them, the masses bring certain characteristic desires of which Benjamin brings up two: first, there’s “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly,” and second, there’s the desire “toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”

This is another place where I just want to tear my hair out at how little is said, because it’s so important. What’s driving the loss of the aura is a social phenomenon. It is both the desire of the masses to bring things closer to themselves in a literal sense by bringing the previously unattainable goods into their homes, and in a ‘human’ sense by getting inside objects, understanding how they work, unpacking how they reproduce, and piercing the veils of mystery that surround them. It is not a coincidence, after all, that advances in scientific technology,

The Enlightenment, the capitalist mode of production, and the importance of the masses all arise around the same time period. As stated, what makes this social phenomenon possible is a change in the mode of existence (i.e., new ways of material organization that begin to chafe against the fetters of the feudalist mode of production). Crucially, it is this social phenomenon that then drives the production of magazines and film (i.e., of mechanical reproduction). Thus, the destruction of the aura is something that we do in our attempt to bring the world closer to us. This signals a different kind of perception:

To pry an object from its sell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.

Note the passage in the apostrophes: this is the defining mark of the contemporary perception. Mechanical reproduction is thus a consequence of and a kind of apex of a social perception in which things are stripped of their uniqueness and made universally equal. Here, again, it’s tempting to think that Benjamin is lamenting this phenomenon, and, unlike the previous place where I discussed this temptation, there’s a bit more plausibility to the charge. However, it’s equally important to note, as Benjamin does, that this kind of perception is just an extension of what is necessary for the sciences to work! (“Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.”)

Biology, for example, cannot work as a science on the assumption that every single animal of plant cell is a unique thing. Likewise, physics and astronomy cannot function under the bespoke particularity of every discrete individual object. All sciences must assume a ‘sense of universal equality of things’ against which differences are explained. All Benjamin is saying is that this same way of thinking is now being applied to perception and to how the masses see the world. With that comes the loss of the aura. This is only a mark of the last dying vestiges of a mystified perception in which some things are not equal but are vested with unique magical properties that set them apart from what us, ordinary humans can do collectively.

In other words, yes, the aura is being destroyed, yes, it is making things less special than they used to be, but the loss of this is a dialectical movement towards liberation and away from fetish. Keep all this in mind.

In fact, in some respects, it might look better than the original. More on this in a bit.

The German text is “Der Grund ist ein doppelter, Erstens erweist sich die technische Reproduktion dem Original gegenüber selbständiger als die manuelle.” Now, I don’t know German, but I’m pretty sure “dem Original” means “the original” and that nothing is made clearer…

I refer the reader to what else but Marx’s Capital: Vol I for the authoritative analysis on commodities.

Not quite the existentialists’ “existence precedes essence” but one can see why so many existentialists were also Marxists.

The Vienna Genesis is a 6th century illuminated manuscript that, from my very surface research, seems to have signaled an important break with previous art traditions. I have no clue who Riegl and Wickhoff are other than members of the Viennese school and who, apparently, discussed how this stuff affected perception of time.

Indeed, the very tools which mark these advances: telescopes, microscopes, sextants, etc. are all tools which help in bringing something closer to analysis.