9 Beyond Bourgeois Aesthetics

Recapitulation: authority and culture

We ended last week with the need for a theory of culture. After Lukács (LOO-kahch; /ˈlukaːtʃ/) and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, culture is the medium of consciousness, and for Lukács the commodity form imprints itself on consciousness as reification. And there is a tension to face: between Marxism and modernism, is there a contradiction, or an ideal? The theorists of the tradition, Marx and Lukács included, loved bourgeois art. What should a Marxist make of it, and of the new art that was trying to leave it behind?

Walter Benjamin

Life

Walter Benjamin (BEN-yah-meen; /ˈbɛnjamiːn/) was born in Berlin in July 1892, into a Jewish middle-class family that became wealthy. As a young man he was drawn to the utopian youth movement, the world of der Wandervogel (dair VAHN-der-foh-gel; /deːɐ̯ ˈvandɐˌfoːɡl̩/) (“the wandering bird”): something like the Boy Scouts, with hiking and seeking, but carrying a utopian idea of youth as a rebellion against the conformist, desiccated life of the parents. The movement’s leader, Gustav Wyneken (VEE-neh-ken; /ˈviːnəkn̩/), betrayed it, as Benjamin saw it, by supporting the First World War, and Benjamin broke with him. He studied in Berlin, in Freiburg (where he sat in the same seminar of the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert (RIK-ert; /ˈʁɪkɐt/) as the young Martin Heidegger (HY-deg-er; /ˈhaɪ̯dɛɡɐ/)), in Munich, and in Switzerland, where he took his doctorate at Bern.

He wanted to be the foremost critic of German letters. For his habilitation at Frankfurt he wrote on the German baroque mourning play, the Trauerspiel (TROW-er-shpeel; /ˈtʁaʊ̯ɐʃpiːl/). Most scholars thought the genre decadent. Benjamin liked these plays precisely because they were so hopeless and violent; he believed they were, in their way, expressionist. He submitted the work to Hans Cornelius (kor-NAY-lee-ooss; /kɔʁˈneːli̯ʊs/) in Frankfurt, and the habilitation failed: he was told to withdraw it to spare himself the embarrassment of rejection. So he became a public intellectual instead, writing for newspapers and speaking on the radio.

In 1933 he left Germany for Paris, where he lived until 1940, with stays in Denmark (with Bertolt Brecht (BREKHT; /bʁɛçt/)) and elsewhere. When the war began he was interned by the French as a German national without French citizenship. As the Germans converged on Paris he fled south, to Marseille, with an American visa the Institute had helped him obtain but no French exit visa. In late September 1940 he crossed the Pyrenees on foot to the Spanish border town of Portbou, where officials refused to let the group through. Facing return to France and the Gestapo, Benjamin took his own life with morphine. The guards let the rest of the group through the next day. Horkheimer (HORK-hy-mer; /ˈhɔʁkhaɪ̯mɐ/) and Adorno, who had made a place for him in New York, were devastated.

After the war, Benjamin was made known to American readers by Hannah Arendt and others, who edited, prefaced and translated him: Illuminations (1968, with Arendt’s introduction) and Reflections (1978), both from Schocken Books.

Major works

• “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” (his dissertation, Bern, 1919)
• The Origin of the German Mourning Play [Trauerspiel] (1928)
• The Arcades Project (unfinished)
• major essays on Goethe’s (GUR-teh; /ˈɡøːtə/) Elective Affinities, and on aesthetics, literature, politics and culture

“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1935–36)

The avant-garde and the left

Benjamin’s essay enters a long argument on the left about avant-garde art. Before Stalin there was Soviet modernism, and above all Soviet film: Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) is the great example. Stalin reacted violently against modernist art; the line that followed was repressive, ideologically dogmatic and, frankly, boring, and after the Second World War it hardened into the policy named for Andrei Zhdanov (ZHDAH-nof; /ˈʐdanəf/), “Zhdanovism.”

In the West the great modernist of the left was Brecht, with his idea of “epic theater.” The bourgeoisie, Brecht said, had a “culinary” theater: a comfortable meal of illusions. He wanted to shock the audience out of it, to strip the illusions away (actors change costume in front of you, the mechanics of the stage are left visible), to seize the theatergoer and produce the Verfremdungseffekt (fair-FREM-doongs-eh-fekt; /fɛɐ̯ˈfʁɛmdʊŋsʔɛˌfɛkt/), the “estrangement effect”: the familiar made strange, so that we think about it rather than sink into it. (Lars von Trier’s Dogville, with its chalk-outline set, is a modern example of Brechtian aesthetics.) Brecht and Benjamin were friends.

Benjamin’s contribution

Benjamin’s essay is a critique of bourgeois aesthetics. Bourgeois art, he argues, still lives on something magical: the “aura” of the work, its quasi-religious, enchanting nature. The aura goes back to the artwork’s origin in magic and religion, and to its uniqueness and its place in tradition. A statue of Venus meant one thing to the Greeks, who worshipped it, and another to medieval clerics, who saw it as an idol; but both faced its uniqueness, its aura. The earliest art served ritual, and even the secular cult of beauty since the Renaissance is ritual in disguise. When photography, the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, appeared, art sensed a crisis and answered with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art (lar poor LAR; /laʁ puʁ laʁ/), art for art’s sake: a theology of art, and in fact a negative theology, the idea of a “pure” art that denies any social function. (Quotation 1.) The bourgeoisie engages with art as a substitute religion.

New techniques of reproduction, in photography and film above all, change everything. What withers in the age of technical reproducibility is the aura of the work of art. Reproduction detaches the object from tradition; it puts a plurality of copies in place of a unique existence; it lets the copy meet the viewer in his own situation. (Quotation 2.) For the first time, technical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. More and more, the work reproduced is the work designed for reproducibility: from one photographic negative you can make any number of prints, and to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. And once authenticity no longer applies, the whole function of art is reversed: instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on politics. (Quotation 3.)

This changes how the masses respond to art. “The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting,” Benjamin writes, “changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie.” (Quotation 4.) For us, recall the blocked subject–object consciousness of reification: here is a crack in it. In the reproduced image, in film especially, people can see themselves, and that is (for Benjamin) a communist possibility.

Then comes the essay’s famous ending. “Fiat ars – pereat mundus,” says fascism: fiat ars, pereat mundus (FEE-aht ARSS, PEH-reh-aht MOON-dooss; /ˈfi.at ars ˈpe.re.at ˈmun.dus/), “let art be made, though the world perish.” Fascism expects war, as the futurist Marinetti (mah-ree-NET-tee; /mariˈnetti/) admitted, to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception changed by technology. This is the consummation of l’art pour l’art. Humanity’s self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. That is the situation of politics that fascism renders aesthetic, cult-like. “Communism responds by politicizing art.” (Quotation 5.) For Benjamin the future of art is communist.

Open questions

• From Gershom Scholem (SHOH-lem; /ˈʃoːləm/), Benjamin’s friend and the great scholar of Jewish mysticism: is Marxism distorting Benjamin’s deeper theological insights?
• From Adorno: isn’t Brecht’s affirmation of non-auratic art one-sided, undialectical? Adorno hated the Brechtian influence. For him the true modernist art, the real post-bourgeois art, is autonomous high modernism.
• Is there an emancipatory promise in a post-bourgeois aesthetic experience: an avant-garde aesthetic?
• What would Benjamin make of commodified art that is not avant-garde? He is not necessarily advocating for modern popular culture.
• Is the very idea of the aura’s dissolution undialectical?

Concluding remarks: Adorno’s letter

Adorno answered the essay in a letter of 18 March 1936. Benjamin, he wrote, underestimates the technical character of autonomous art and overestimates that of dependent art. He urged Benjamin to drop the Brechtian motifs, which misunderstood the real consciousness of real workers, who have no advantage over their bourgeois counterparts except their interest in the revolution and otherwise bear all the marks of the mutilated bourgeois character. His own task, he said, was to hold Benjamin’s arm steady until the Brechtian sun had set. (Quotation 6.) For Adorno the decay of the aura is not good: it does not make art available for revolution; it exposes art to commodification. That is the subject of his essay on music, next time.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation: authority and culture

• on the need for a theory of culture
• culture as medium of consciousness (after G. Lukács and Antonio Gramsci)
• Lukács on the commodity form in consciousness: reification
• between Marxism and modernism: contradiction or ideal?

II. Walter Benjamin, life and work

• A. Biography
  • born in Berlin, July 1892
  • youth movement; studies in Berlin, Heidelberg, Switzerland
  • failure of the habilitation, Frankfurt
  • move to Paris 1933; life in Paris 1933–1940 (intermittently in Denmark, etc.)
  • internment, and flight southward to Marseilles
  • death at Franco-Spanish border (in Pyrenees), late September 1940
• B. Major works
  • “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” (Bern, Switzerland)
  • The Origin of the German Mourning Play [Trauerspiel]
  • The Arcades Project (incomplete)
  • major essays on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, on aesthetics, literature, politics, culture
  • early postwar collections in English (Schocken Books): Illuminations (preface by Hannah Arendt, 1968) and Reflections (1978)

III. Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1935–36)

• A. The avant-garde and the left: debates in the 1920s and ’30s
  • Soviet modernism and film: Sergei Eisenstein (e.g., Battleship Potemkin, 1925)
  • the Stalinist reaction against modernism: the rise of “Zhdanovite” policy after WWII
  • Bertolt Brecht and the idea of “epic theater,” the Verfremdungseffekt (or “estrangement-effect”)
• B. Benjamin’s contribution
  • a critique of bourgeois aesthetics
  • the bourgeois idea of the “aura”: the artwork in magic and religion, uniqueness and tradition
  • bourgeois cult of “art for art’s sake” is elevated into a “negative theology” of art [quote 1]
  • new techniques of reproducibility (esp. in photography and film)
  • the decay of the aura and new aesthetic possibilities [quote 2] [quote 3]
  • the modern experience of artwork and its effect on the masses [quote 4]
  • fascism as the “aestheticization of politics,” communism as the politicization of art [quote 5]
• C. Open questions
  • warnings from Scholem: Marxism as distorting Benjamin’s deeper theological insights
  • warnings from Adorno: Brecht’s one-sided or undialectical affirmation of non-auratic art
  • the emancipatory promise of post-bourgeois aesthetic experience: an avant-garde aesthetic?
  • what would Benjamin make of commodified but non-avant-garde aesthetics?
  • is Benjamin’s idea of the dissolution of the aura undialectical?

IV. Concluding remarks

• Adorno’s letter (18 March 1936) [quote 6]
• currents and counter-currents in Marxist art-criticism
• Adorno’s essay on the commodification of art and the impoverishment of experience [next lecture]

On the back: (1)–(5) Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1935–36); (6) Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 18 March 1936.