Socialist Reading Series II: Walter Benjamin [END]

Epilogue and Concluding Thoughts

We’re at the end! I’m going to give a short account of the Epilogue and then deliver some parting remarks. As always, a link to the text.

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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.

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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?

Look at all this talent! Oscar Winners!

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.

1. I don’t pretend to be neutral in my presentation here. I am and will always be an anti-fascist.

2. Or rather, at least one of its roles.

3. Virtually everything the Democratic party has done since the 90’s can be understood through this framework in which freedom of expression is actively encouraged while any material political change is actively discouraged.

4. Indeed, the very same specter of the cultic terrorist is resurrected now in the context of the Palestinian genocide, and, from the looks of it, it’s working perfectly in Israel, and nearly perfectly in the US.

5. One must remember, that the arrival of Communism doesn’t spell the end of history, but rather the end of prehistory. Prehistory, in this context, marks the period during which society is not aware of its own role in the making of the world and which treats social relations as immutable laws of nature. We are reminded that we are still in such a period every time we appeal to “the markets” or “the economy” as an explanation for why some people die from easily preventable diseases or starvation, while others live like kings. It’s as though the markets and the economy were eternal and unchanging facts of nature like the speed of light or the rate at which objects fall to the earth, and not mutable social relations. In this sense, a society which caters to technological progress rather than harnessing it is still very much a society that neither understands itself, nor the world around it.

6. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the Marvel superhero movies exploded with Iron Man. Still, I think one of the funniest and dumbest examples of super hero movie incompetence has got to be The Batman for doing its best to provide an alternative while staying strictly within the lines of what is acceptable. I swear, I thought at one point in the film Batman was going to look directly at the camera and say “I can’t do this alone. This is why it’s important to vote blue this election season.”

7. Would he have also been unaware of Eisenstein’s films on the Russian Revolution? And if he could see that those films could have leftist content, why would it be so inconceivable to him that right-wing content couldn’t also be put into the films?

8. I have great respect for the Frankfurt School, but I think their turn away from Marxist economics and towards the analysis of culture was one of the biggest intellectual mistakes by the left in the 20th century.

9. Racism will not be ended by reading Robin DeAngelo, by watching Black Panther, or laughing at Nannette.