Socialist Reading Series II: Walter Benjamin [Part 9]
Socialist Reading Series II: Walter Benjamin [Part 9]
Sections XIV-XV
No time to waste! Follow along with a link to the text.
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.
Here, Benjamin actually seems to break with Marxist tradition, since it is commodities themselves that are the primary object of mystification under the capitalist mode of production. One’s buttons and cigarettes do appear as special objects which appear to exude a non-socially mediated value. Granted, the mystification of the commodity—commodity fetishism—is not quite the same as the mystification produced by the artistic aura, but one might still wonder why one type of mystification would undo the other. It’s possible that I just don’t have the correct reading here and that what destroys the aura for the Dadaists is something other than their use of ready-made commodities. But I’d need some more evidence for that conclusion since much of the text seems to suggest precisely that kind of interpretation.
One of the nicknames for the television is “idiot box.”
Okay, it’s a bit more complicated than just seeing what they can offer us. But the point still stands—we’re in a sense not encountering something entirely new when considering an art form consumed by the distracted masses.
If it’s not obvious, I’m picturing a rather confused cathedral.
Indeed, it is not through contemplation either that we come to the conclusion that there should be things like gender neutral bathrooms either! Rather, it is through the lived experience of trans and nonbinary folks—and through the disruption of habit that gendered bathrooms pose for them—that we come to this understanding.
This is for the people who may have doubted “bathroom” is an architectural feature. Make your own examples!