I’ve got some other things in drafts that I’m looking forward to finishing—something on Lenin, something on reality television, something on withholding one’s vote, and a translation project. But I want to finish this first. As always, a link to the text.
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
This is a quote from Marx from somewhere in Capital—I can’t remember where exactly.
A more familiar example for our time, then, might be a similar change in the popular attitudes to rock and roll and rap music.
It is possible that Benjamin allows that the public’s reaction to Picasso has also gone from reactionary to progressive although it was originally purely reactionary. The difference in these two readings is, I take it, of little importance.
Consider, for example, that Taylor Swift’s music is very socially significant, but is hardly met with general criticism and aversion, and that, the aforementioned noise musicians are not at all socially significant (sorry), and they are frequently met with criticism and aversion. Perhaps Benjamin means something very specific by the term “socially significant” that I’m missing, but I’m not sure what that could be.
We’ve seen this point before, too, when talking about the effect that the camera has on the actor.
Indeed, this is why horror films can serve as a lens into understanding the anxieties of different generations rather that, say, the anxieties of particular directors that just happened to live in the 40’s or 50’s.
There may be exceptions to this. If I recall correctly, Jeff Koons aims to make the most widely appealing, innocuous art. This is also a separate question for the question of whether “high art” is still made for some audience—namely, the audience of art critics. In either case, though, I hope the distinction here is clear.
Dune II opened to $32.1 million from 4,071 locations (https://variety.com/2024/film/box-office/dune-2-opening-day-box-office-1235927316/#:~:text=the%20box%20office.-,Warner%20Bros.,and%20earlier%20event%20preview%20screenings.) I’ll let you do the math on how many people saw that film at the same time.
I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but there’s some overlap here with Plato’s criticism of the artist as someone who only deals with appearances. There’s a neat way of reading Benjamin as offering a rebuttal to Plato—here is an art form that pierces the veil of appearances and lets you get to the truth. If I were still in grad school, this would be the time when I would dream of writing a paper about this. Now that I’m out of grad school, I don’t have to worry about these things. They can live in the footnotes.
Reagan was attempting to quote John Adams and say “facts are stubborn things.” http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/279.html
It should be mentioned in passing that nothing here hangs on what one thinks about the validity of Freudian psychoanalysis or the importance of slips of the tongue. The same point could be made just as easily with the difference between some observed physical symptom—say, a pale skin and low energy—and the underlying pathology that explains it (e.g., low blood iron).
I harp on this because I was surprised at the number of students I had who got the impression that the loss of the aura was a bad thing.