Towards a Politics of ‘Pure Means’: Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence

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‘Remarks on Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence’ by Anthony Auerbach,

paper presented to the seminar After 1968, led by Katja Diefenbach, Jan van Eyck Academie, 2007.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47 (1920/21), pp. 809–832. Page numbers in brackets refer to ‘Critique of Violence’, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, in: One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: NLB, 1979).

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There are no revolutions in Germany,
because the police would not allow it.

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1848

In the following comments on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ I would like to give a brief synopsis of the main points of his argument and to amplify some of the hints dispersed throughout the text, that is, with additional hints rather than a full explanation. But first I would like to consider the motivations of this text, which was, at the time of writing, almost completely deprived of readers. Not only was the manuscript rejected by the editor who originally commissioned it, but Benjamin’s discourse took place outside of any academic or political community and was circulated among some of Benjamin’s friends, who didn’t necessarily speak to each other about it. Benjamin’s writing would therefore merit the designation ‘meditation’ on violence.

I perceive two motivations whose relationship in the text could be described as perverse, given the seemingly divergent demands they would make on the writer. On one hand, Benjamin aims to provide a prolegomenon to the transcendental critique of violence: a metaphysical enterprise on the Kantian model. On the other hand, Benjamin aims to come to terms with his own situation in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. The first mobilises an almost parodic amalgam of philosophical, juridical and theological abstractions which is interrupted by a series of references, mobilised by the second motivation, to the recent war, constitutional turmoil, general strike, failed revolution, parliament and police. These interruptions lend urgency the task of discovering or constructing a standpoint for the critique of violence ‘outside positive legal philosophy but also outside natural law’ (134) and moreover suggest what is at stake in the ‘historico-philosophical’ view of law.

Benjamin’s critique thus neither advocates, condones nor rejects violence, but begins with a fundamental assessment of the paralysis of the dominant trends in the discussion of violence, pointing out how opposing sides of the debate both lead to contradictions because they share terms which are accepted as axiomatic, but which are not in fact independent. Benjamin argues that it is not possible to separate violence from law; that all violence is either law-making or law-preserving; that all law, however remote it may seem from its origins and from the forces which maintain it, is latent violence. Therefore it is violence itself which decides what violence is justifiable for what ends. This circle defines violence self-evidently as a natural means of achieving natural or legal ends.

The power established by law-making violence threatens the law-breaker with law-preserving violence. But this threat is subject to fate, because the criminal might not get caught, and his or her ‘violation’ of the law threatens to become in turn a law-making violence and thus a challenge to existing power. However, if it is not just a matter of getting away with it at an individual level and the challenge to existing power is self-conscious and victorious — as in a political revolution — then the contest can only begin again. Benjamin characterises this as a mythical cycle bound to endless repetition like the mythical punishments — or perhaps bound to violent tautology as in Kafka’s penal colony where the punishment consists in the mechanical inscription of the law on the body of the guilty victim.

These are the cycles of repetition which constitute history as a series of disasters prompted by fate and which at all costs must be stopped. Here, what is at stake in philosophical history becomes a personal risk. In ‘Critique of Violence’ Benjamin proposes what he calls ‘pure means’, that is, means without ends. For it is the logic of ends which powers the mythical machine. Benjamin acknowledges possible forms of non-violent resolution of potential conflicts between people, but these are immaterial because the are not legal, and as soon as they would be codified by legal contract or treaty, would again be subject to force.

Benjamin locates his answer to such insoluble problems in the crossing of the idea of a ‘proletarian general strike’ which he gets from Sorel and the idea of ‘divine violence’. I’ll come to divine violence in a moment. First, I think it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on ‘proletarian’ in Benjamin’s use of the term and thus lend it a more direct relation to Marx that it really has. What is important for Benjamin is not the proletarian as such but the distinction Sorel makes between what he called a ‘proletarian general strike’ and a ‘political general strike’, the latter being a form of violence intended to extort concessions for workers from the bosses, but without fundamentally changing the relationship between them. The hypothetical proletarian general strike on the other hand makes no demands other than the complete transformation of social relations and of work itself. It announces only the intention of abolishing the state and its powers, not of usurping them. Benjamin regards this strike as ‘pure means’ and therefore not violent, even though the strike action itself (that is, not working) is the same as a violent extortionate strike. It is not violent because its ends are, at least from the point of view of a pragmatist, radically senseless, unreasonable and extravagant. Its only intention is non-participation in the logic of ends and means and a refusal of mythical imperatives. This intention is perhaps the seed of its metaphysical failure, certainly enough to provoke violent suppression by existing powers. Clearly, this strike signals a utopian ambition or messianic hope which Benjamin might share with Marx.

Benjamin’s messianism consists in the demand that everything must be different, and moreover that there is work for him personally to do in bringing about this transfiguration. (That is, not just waiting and hoping.) This is what resonates in Benjamin’s thought with the Jewish messianic tradition, although that doesn’t necessarily authorise a Talmudic approach to Benjamin’s text. Indeed, caution is required in dealing with Benjamin’s theology. The divine, in ‘Critique of Violence’, is everything which stands in absolute opposition to the mythical: ‘Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythical violence is confronted by the divine. [...] If mythical violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying.’ (150). I might add: this also is myth.

Turning now to the situatedness of Benjamin’s meditation, it would be nice to be able to give you clear and concise overview of the political and social conditions in which Benjamin wrote. Perhaps at least as instructive as we go on to discuss recent interpretations of ‘Critique of Violence’ might be to consider, in contrast, our situatedness as readers. Where we are today, in a peaceful Europe, we have little reason to fear a general mobilisation to war, an outbreak of proletarian revolution or class conflict. While organised labour threatens no more than occasional inconvenience, we have much to benefit from the state’s organisation of unemployment (not to mention the decimation of manufacturing industry, informalisation of labour etc.), including the expansion and extension of higher education as embodied by the Jan van Eyck Academie. We are hardly concerned with anti-Semitism, which has gone out of fashion amongst our class besides being officially repressed along with the consciousness of the destruction of European Jewry which began not long after Benjamin wrote. We experience prejudice mainly as privilege and consider our protection from racist violence and criminality in general as a right.

Armed Spartakists marching in Berlin, 1918 or 1919 (picture postcard, collection AA)

The war supposedly ‘to end all wars’ which ended in 1918 left Germany in a state of political confusion and violence which we would sooner associate with present-day Iraq than modern Europe. But it isn’t the parallel with another state which has recently suffered a military defeat, mass-demobilisation and the deposition of an autocratic ruler which matters. The question is, what is the possible relation between the abstract considerations of violence — with their legendary exemplars — and the reference Benjamin makes to ‘contemporary European conditions’ (135) — which would have needed no illustration in 1921.

Benjamin was not alone in perceiving a historic chance when the ancien régime quit the scene. The Emperor abdicated on 9 November 1918, when revolution threatened to succeed mutiny. Within hours, two republics were declared, bringing the split over support for the war which had divided German socialists in 1914 into an open, violent contest for the state. In an attempt to forestall the revolutionary forces which might have been stirred by the intended announcement of a constitutional monarchy, and to secure the succession of the SPD, Philipp Scheidemann declared the first German republic from the balcony of the Reichstag. This half-hearted republic was Scheidemann’s own initiative, but could not be revoked. Karl Liebknecht meanwhile proclaimed a ‘free socialist republic’ from the balcony of the Royal Palace itself and pledged revolution. The showdown came in January 1919 with the so-called Spartacist Uprising, which proceeded, with KPD and USPD backing, from the occupation of buildings by workers to mass demonstrations and general strike. Without a clear plan, this revolution failed because of disputes among the leadership concerning the use of violence and ultimately because the workers were no match for the paramilitary forces unleashed to crush them. The government deployed Freikorps troops mustered by former army staff to suppress communist uprisings throughout Germany. The Freikorps have been variously described as private armies recruited by former generals, anti-republican paramilitary organisations, freelance right-wing militias, gangsters of the extreme Right, and, the men who could not be ‘debrutalised’ after the war (according to Hermann Göring). They carried out their (quasi-police) work with enthusiasm and savagery and without effective political control. Famously responsible for the abduction, torture and murder of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg following the failed January Revolution — a failure still celebrated in Berlin today — the Freikorps had a hand in hundreds political murders perpetrated without fear of the law. In contrast, left-wing militants were pursued and severely punished by the judicial authorities as well as by right-wing thugs.

Changing of the guard: retreat of von Lüttwitz’s forces following the Kapp Putsch, Berlin, 1920 (picture postcard, collection AA)

The SPD-led government signed Treaty of Versailles and thus got the blame not only for the onerous and humiliating terms of the treaty, but for Germany’s defeat itself, which conservatives and militarists (who had started and lost the war) attributed to a ‘stab in the back’. The government had no power to disband the Freikorps militias as the peace treaty required and indeed still relied on them to repress left-wing agitation. In 1920 the Freikorps staged its own coup d’état — the so-called Kapp Putsch — which, when the regular army refused to intervene, was answered by a general strike such as the SPD had failed to call in 1914. Walther von Lüttwitz’s Marinebrigade Ehrhardt which was the force behind the coup withdrew from Berlin (apparently leaving a bloody wake) and was nominally dissolved. Freikorps militias however continued to be active in suppressing left-wing activities both on behalf of the government and on their own initiative. Many former Freikorps soldiers graduated to the Nazi SA, which, though officially formed in 1921, has its roots in the reform of the Freikorps.

To this outline of major trends in political violence between 1918 and 1921 when Benjamin wrote his ‘Critique’ could be added snapshots of economic insecurity resulting from blockade, unemployment and the beginnings of hyper-inflation which threatened workers and the middle-classes equally. In the absence or crisis of legitimate authority and in the face of opportunity — for some — and poverty and hunger for many, non-political violence and criminality flourished. This was reflected at the extremes in the popularity of lurid cultural expressions or celebrations of violence — often with sadistic and sexualised overtones — and in cases of true-life Sweeny Todds.

Arguably, the confusion Benjamin perceived in contemporary conceptions of violence (whose ramifications threatened him personally) has its roots in Romanticism. Resistance to Romanticism is the oblique polemical force of ‘Critique of Violence’, for it is Romanticism which unites the failure of revolutions with the cult of death in a repetitious cycle without even dialectical hope. The Romantic revolutionary’s dreams are fulfilled in martyrdom while the cult of death demands sacrifice, not transformation. The failure of revolution is required and celebrated by the cult of death whose hunger for victims is attested by the empty tombs which punctuate the urban landscape of Berlin today.

http://aauerbach.info/research/urban/benjamin_violence.html

Towards a Politics of ‘Pure Means’: Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence

August 28, 2011

By Sami Khatib

1. On Benjamin’s Critique of Violence

Walter Benjamin’s essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt or On the Critique of Violence was first published in 1921, in the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.[1] It was intended to be part of a greater, either lost or uncompleted work on politics, consisting of two parts, The True Politician and True Politics.[2] It is notable that Benjamin’s early work on politics around 1920 was written shortly after the failed German revolution of 1918/19 and in the light of communist and anarcho-syndicalist uprisings in various regions in Germany. Within his oeuvre, Critique of Violence has a unique place since it is the first explicit political essay and his last great work on politics before his Marxist turn in 1924. In 1921, Benjamin had read neither Marx nor Lenin; the political thought he was familiar with ranged from anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist authors such as Gustav Landauer and Georges Sorel, the metaphysico-political circle around Erich Unger, to the early Ernst Bloch of Spirit of Utopia, and the early anarcho-Zionist Gershom Scholem who later became one of the most important scholars in Jewish mysticism. However one eval‎uates the importance of this intellectual context, I argue that none of these influences can fully account for the uniqueness of the radical attempt Benjamin undertook in his essay on the Critique of Violence, that is to say, undoing the nexus of life, law, and violence.

2. What is Violence?

The German word Gewalt originates from the Old High German word waltan which roughly translates into ‘to be strong’, ‘to dominate’, or ‘to master.’ In modern High German Gewalt possesses a variety of contradictory meanings, among them violence, force, coercion, power and authority. The latter meaning is today most notably used in the German constitutional “Basic Law” (Grundgesetz), the 20^th article of which reads: “Alle Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus.” [All state authority/power is derived from the people.].[3] As Étienne Balibar notes, “the term Gewalt thus contains an intrinsic ambiguity: it refers, at the same time, to the negation of law or justice and to their realization or the assumption of responsibility for them by an institution (generally the state).”[4] Due to this ambiguity, for Benjamin the problem of Gewalt is inherent to all legal and ethical questions, as the opening sentence of his essay suggests: “The task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice.” (SW 1, 236)[5]

3. Means and Ends

According to Benjamin, within a legal system the most essential relation is that between means and ends; if violence is not an ethical or legal goal, it can only be found in the sphere of means,as an effective force and sanctioning violence whatever its justification or legitimization might be. The basic dogma of any theory of violence is therefore: “just ends can be attained by justified means, justified means used for just ends.” (237) Benjamin mentions two legal schools that diametrically legitimate violence: “natural law” and “positive law”. While the former “perceives in the use of violent means to just ends no greater problem than a man sees in his ‘right’ to move his body in the direction of a desired goal” (236), the latter, the school of positive law, is more concerned with just means. Benjamin does not side with either school, though he recognizes the effort of the school of “positive law” to focus on the justification of means as such, whereas the school of natural law conceives of violence as a quasi-organic “product of nature, as it were a raw material” (236f.). However, both schools, natural and positive law, share a common mistake: when speaking about violence they believe in the instrumental nexus of ends and means. “Natural law attempts, by the justness of the ends, to ‘justify’ the means, positive law to ‘guarantee’ the justness of the ends through the justification of the means.” (237) In contrast, Benjamin denies any critique of violence based upon a theory of just ends or of just means.

This denial is not only of theoretical but of major political importance. Whereas the position of natural law is often at issue when armed anti-hegemonic, anti-statal, or anti-colonial struggles are to be legitimized, the opposite standpoint of positive law is normally put forward by the state in order to justify state repression and institutionalized coercion. Although both standpoints are diametrically opposed in their emphasis on either just ends or justified means, they share the belief that violence has always to be perceived within a causal chain of means and ends. Benjamin, however, insists on independent criteria for both just ends and justified means.

Following this argumentation, even the most basic theological principle from the Decalogue, “Thou shalt not kill”, cannot be perceived as a forbidden means with regard to certain just or unjust ends. On the contrary, the deed itself, the means of killing, has to be scrutinized as such without referring to a possible goal. Therefore, “no judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment”; it does not exist “as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities” (250). A guideline for actions, however, can never be fully applied to a situation since it only offers a general orientation; it always needs a negotiation whether and how a concrete situation can be guided by an ethical principle. It is precisely this infinite and non-accomplishable work of negotiation that arises from this lack of absolute judgment which Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals wanted to contain. According to Kant’s first formulation of the Categorical Imperative, you are to “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”[6] Because this imperative is not a means to certain ends but a self-sufficient end-in-itself or pure end, it has to maintain a time-less and universal applicability to all possible historical situations. Yet Benjamin strongly opposes this empty and homogenous temporality of the Kantian Categorical Imperative. Since no historical situation is identical to another, nothing can be said categorically in advance. As much as the ‘force-of-law’ hinges on its universal applicability to any concrete historical situation, its classic ethical foundation in Kant’s Categorical Imperative is based upon a timeless universalizability abstracting from concrete historical and never recurring situations. For Benjamin, therefore, the universal value of an ethical guideline must never be conflated with the universalizability of judgments, principles, or imperatives.

4. The Dialectic of Mythic Violence

As Werner Hamacher argues in his reading of Critique of Violence, every positing [Setzung] of law or ethical principle already implies its reversal for every positing requires its enforcement against any other acts of positing, setting, or constituting.[7] Hence, the logic of positing is always threatened by other acts of positing. Within the paradigm of the state, Benjamin distinguishes between two forms of violence that mutually presuppose and deconstruct each other: “All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving.” (243) While the former concerns the constitutive act of establishing power through violence, i.e. terror, war-on-terror, or “original accumulation”, the latter is embedded in state-institutions. Benjamin calls these two forms of violence “mythic violence” because their intrinsic dialectic leads into an inescapable and circular logic: any law-destroying act results in a new positing [Setzung] of law which again violently tries to preserve itself. For Benjamin this fateful cycle of overcoming law by re-establishing it is a clear indicator that there is something fundamentally “rotten in the law.” (242)

Put into practice, however, these two forms of mythic violence are difficult to differentiate. In the sphere of direct state repression, i.e. police force, law-preserving force and law-making violence are always spectrally conflated (because the police preserves law precisely by enforcing new regulations or by re-eval‎uating established sanctions), whereas in the realm of the social order mythic violence has become almost invisible. While excessive law-making violence is today more or less ‘outsourced’ from the capitalist centre into the periphery, in contemporary post-Fordist capitalism mythic violence tends to obscure its law-making force by turning into a seemingly intangible juridical web of bio-political practices. This form of law-preserving violence operates as a self-producing and self-eternalizing ‘microphysics of power’ producing and re-producing, disciplining and controlling, regulating and sanctioning bare life as actual, potential or superfluous labor force. Mythic violence has thus become the political economy of bare life – however productive the latter’s labor potential might be.

5. Pure Means

Against mythic violence and its inherent cycle of law-making and law-preserving violence Benjamin searches for a nonviolent, pure or unalloyed violence that could suspend the application of law to bare life. His name for this violence is “divine violence” – a paradoxically pure or non-violent violence that coincides with its tautological opposite: a strikingly violent violence. Before we turn to the latter, let us tarry with the profane and have a closer look at Benjamin’s expression‎ of “pure means” that can break the cycle of mythic violence since it is not bound to any ends.

At first sight, a means without end is a paradoxical expression‎ since a means is normally defined with regard to an end. In other words, the common understanding of a means already implies a teleological reference to an end to which it is subordinated as a secondary instrument. This hierarchy becomes most apparent when speaking of an end-in-itself indifferent to its supplementing means. For example, values, ideals, ethical end-goals such as freedom, equality, or self-determination etc. From a Kantian perspective, Benjamin’s formula of a means without end can be read as an inversion of the ethical end-in-itself emancipating the plane of means from its secondary, supportive role. It is not by accident that in the Critique of Violence Benjamin avoids an explicit discussion of Kantian ethics or Moralphilosophie. Instead he takes his cue from Kant’s third critique, the Critique of Judgement and its paradoxical formulation of a Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Endzweck, a  purposiveness without a purpose, which Kant introduced when discussing the aesthetic of the beautiful:

“… the beautiful, the judging of which has as its ground a merely formal purposiveness, i.e., a purposiveness without an end, is entirely independent of the representation of the good, since the latter presupposes an objective purposiveness, i.e., the relation of the object to a determinate end.”[8]

In contrast to Kant, however, Benjamin’s version of Kant’s “purposiveness without a purpose” is not directed to the realm of aesthetics. Benjamin’s expression‎ of “means without end” or “pure means” belongs to the plane of language and politics expressing their inner non-instrumental relation.

A.) Language: Already in his early essay on Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1916), Benjamin introduced the idea of an anti-teleological pure means in linguistic terms: divine “pure language” is language deprived of all its communicating, instrumental and transmitting qualities. Pure language does not serve communicative ends but designates the pure medium of the “mental being” of Man. The various contents of the latter (we might say in linguistics: the “signified”) are not communicated through but in language as the pure medium of language as such. “All language communicates itself.” (63) Therefore, language is not the instrumental bearer of meaning but the ‘un-mediated’ pure medium in which recognition [Erkenntnis] becomes communicable. Hence for Benjamin, recognizability is transcendentally rooted in language. This pure language, or ‘language as such,’ speaks itself in all languages and thereby guarantees the translatability of every language into another. In his essay on The Task of the Translator, which Benjamin wrote at the same time as Critique of Violence, he elaborated further on this theory of pure language providing ground for his theory of the freedom of translation:

“In this pure language […] all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished. […] It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in the interest of the pure language by its effect on its own language.” (261)

Already the concepts employed in this dense passage – extinction, devoiding, and liberation – indicate that Benjamin’s ‘politics of language’ features structurally similar arguments as his ‘politics of violence.’ As pure language extinguishes all positing of intention and information, pure violence de-activates and de-poses the law which is itself an auto-performative function of language. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, the sphere of law is the paradigmatic realm where all human language tends to become performative: ‘doing things with words’ immediately turns factic – legally factic.[9]

B.) Politics: In the political arena, the realm of true freedom and ethical acting beyond instrumental cause-and-effect-calculations can be found in class struggle. Benjamin refers to Georges Sorel and his anarcho-syndicalist distinction between political and proletarian general strike. While the former fights for certain political-economic ends (political rights, higher wages, better working conditions etc.) the latter questions the Staatsgewalt, the state and its power/violence as such. The antithetical opposition of political and proletarian general strike is to be located on the level of their relation to violence: for if the strike is a means to an end, its violence will be instrumental; but if a strike is a pure means without any concrete goal other than overcoming the state, it will reach beyond the vicious circle of mythic violence. In Sorel’s words:

“The political general strike demonstrates how the state will lose none of its strength, how power is transferred from the privileged to the privileged, how the mass of producers will change their masters.” (Sorel) In contrast to this form of strike, the proletarian general strike “nullifies all the ideological consequences of every possible social policy.” (Sorel)[10]

Moreover, it “announces its indifference towards material gain through conquest by declaring its intention to abolish the state”. (Sorel) To put it differently, the proletarian general strike is not a violent means to an end because there are no concessions to be made under which the workers will resume their work under modified or improved conditions. The strike’s ‘striking’ character stems from its unconditional character. It is a “pure means” and therefore nonviolent. While the political general strike remains in the domain of mythic violence since it establishes a new law, the proletarian general strike is anarchistic insofar as it reaches fully beyond law-making violence. In doing so, its deeply anarchistic, a-teleological and non-instrumental character is strictly non-utopian. As a pure means without taking into account its possible consequences, however destructive or catastrophic they might be, the proletarian general strike does not envision a stateless new society. Against any future program Benjamin sides with Sorel’s comment that with the general strike, all utopianism will disappear: “the revolution appears as a clear, simple revolt, and no place is reserved either for the sociologists or for the elegant amateurs of social reforms or for the intellectuals who have made it their profession to think for the proletariat.” (Sorel) Benjamin’s famous theses On the Concept of History from 1940 and their fierce criticism of socialism’s belief in progress will later echo this Sorelian stance towards future programs and visions.

6. Divine versus Mythic

As many commentators have noted (think for instance of Jacques Derrida’s essay Force de loi[11]), Benjamin’s most controversial concept remains “divine violence” – a term the later Marxist Benjamin explicitly dismissed as “an empty blind-spot, a limit concept, and regulative idea.”[12] The pre-Marxist, more Anarchist Benjamin of 1921, however, is still fighting from a radically ethical standpoint against the mythic link between law and its application to life reducing the latter to “bare life.”

For the early Benjamin, ethical monotheism as developed in Hermann Cohen’s The Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) provides a theoretical framework according to which false paganism can be criticized from the standpoint of a truly ethical monotheism (out of the sources of Judaism) purified from all forms of mythic ritual and false equations. Echoing Cohen’s pure monotheism, Benjamin takes the (pagan) mythic and the (monotheist) divine as his most important antithetical opposition. In contrast to Cohen, however, Benjamin’s anti-pagan and anti-mythic standpoint is not limited to theology and ethics but concerns also politics and jurisdiction.

Already in his essay Fate and Character (1919) Benjamin fiercely criticizes the “dogma of the natural guilt of human life, of original guilt, the irredeemable nature of which constitutes the doctrine, and its occasional redemption the cult, of paganism […].” (206) In the centre of Benjamin’s critique stands the principle of guilt and retribution, or, more generally, the nexus of cause and effect, which is the foundation of any modern form of law and ethics. From Benjamin’s monotheist standpoint, there can be no ethical order based on the “guilt nexus of the living” (204). For the nexus of guilt and retribution is a mythic belief and must not be conflated with the truly ethico-political standpoint of justice.[13] Although the legal system grounds its judgments in a thorough investigation of the chain of events, it is precisely the establishment of such a casuistic nexus what turns law into mythic fate that strikes at bare life. “The judge can perceive fate wherever he pleases; with every judgment he must blindly dictate fate. It is never man but only the life in him that it strikes […].” (204) Consequently, there is no essential difference between the mythic belief in guilt and fate and the secular principle of law and judgment.

Fate as the opposite of freedom originates from the realm of the mythic where man is subordinated to the will of gods. As Lukács and early Frankfurt School thinkers have argued, with the rise of modernity and its intrinsic ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ the mythos has returned in the form of mythic beliefs and mythic social relations. Man’s original emancipation from first nature has turned into the subordination to second nature: to society or, as Marx put it, to the domain of the social as a naturwüchsige, naturally-grown relation. This materialist insight is already at work in Benjamin’s early writings when he relates modern law to a mythic cult of guilt resulting in fate.[14]

7. Ent-setzung: De-posing the Law

Against the background of Benjamin’s early sketches and essays between 1917 and 1921 and in light of his take on Cohen’s ethical turn of pure monotheism, it comes as no surprise that his essay on the Critique of Violence employs the antithetical pair pagan/mythic and monotheist/divine as its most crucial opposition. If we consider the following chart, this contraposition becomes apparent.

Mythic violence	Divine Violence
Law-positing rechtssetzend	Law-annihilating rechtsvernichtend
Boundaries-positing Grenzen setzend	Boundlessly destroys boundaries grenzenlos Grenzen vernichtend
Guilt and retribution verschuldend und sühnend	Atoning entsühnend
Threatening drohend	Striking schlagend
Bloody blutig	Lethal without spilling blood auf unblutige Weise letal
Bloody violence over bare life for its own sake Blutgewalt über das bloße Leben	Pure violence over all life for the sake of the living reine Gewalt über alles Leben um des Lebendigen willen
Demands sacrifice fordert Opfer	Accepts sacrifice nimmt Opfer an
Law-making violence is executive violence [schaltende Gewalt] Law-preserving violence is administrative violence [verwaltete Gewalt]	Divine violence is violent/non-violent violence [waltende Gewalt]

The last antithesis above – schaltende and verwaltete versus waltende Gewalt – brings us back to the German word for violence, Gewalt, which derives from waltan. Hence, Benjamin’s formulation waltende Gewalt is strictly speaking tautological: a violent violence which coincides with its opposite, a non-violent violence. Divine violence as a de-posing violence thus denotes neither a positive quality, a positing of something, nor a definite and predictable Event. As Benjamin writes, “only mythic violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory force of violence is not visible to men.” (252) Divine violence as the zero-level of mythic violence can only be retroactively identified as such; in the present situation, however, Benjamin leaves us with vague insinuations: “It may manifest itself in a true war exactly as in the divine judgment of the multitude on a criminal.” (252) This comment indicates that divine violence is not simply an external power, an intrusion from outside. On the contrary, the difficulty of divine violence is precisely that it can take the form of profane violence insofar as it is not mythic. On this thin, almost hairsplitting but nonetheless crucial difference hinges the antithesis of mythic and divine violence: In revealing no deeper meaning or mythical secret, divine violence has a proto critico-ideological function rendering it impossible to justify or legitimize.

Nevertheless, divine violence is not an empty signifier, a mere stand-in for something untouchable but the inaccessible correspondence to the revolutionary deactivation of mythic violence, that is to say, of undoing law and its cycle of law-positing and law-preserving violence. It is this revolutionary deactivation as pure immediate violence that de-poses the law:

“ … on the de-posing of law [Entsetzung des Rechts] with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded. If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of pure violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means.”

It is crucial not to conflate divine violence with ‘the highest manifestation of pure violence by man’, that is, revolutionary violence as a pure means (e.g. in the proletarian general strike). Before examining the paradoxical structure of de-posing the law, let us take a closer look at the difference between divine violence and revolutionary violence as a non-violent – pure – means. How are we to conceive of the nature of their correspondence? What is the divinity of divine violence as opposed to the profaneness of the de-posing of law?

As a preliminary answer, I propose to understand divine violence as the theological name for an inaccessible site within the order of the profane, that is to say, divine violence is not some exterior, transcendent power intervening into human affairs from outside but corresponds to a dimension at the very heart of profane life itself: it refers to an ‘extimate kernel’, an excess of profane life not reducible to mythic violence. Divine violence thus remains an empty blind spot introducing a minimal cut into the mythic cycle of becoming and decaying rendering it impossible to finally close the bio-political web of mythic violence. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the profane, divine violence, in fact, represents a dimension exterior to the everyday life of mythic violence. From this viewpoint, the divine character of divine violence consists of a lack that can only be addressed in terms of correspondences and not by means of equation or identification. In other words, revolutionary violence as the profane embodiment of something inaccessible at the very heart of the profane refers to divine violence (without being identical with it). Paradoxically, on the one hand, divine violence belongs to the order of the Event: it is not an integral part of human life but introduces a caesura into the mythic nexus of life and law[15]; on the other hand, however, it can be performed, embodied or staged by humans in the form of revolutionary violence.

To conclude, let us return to the structure of de-posing. In terms of quality, agency and temporality, pure or non-violent violence implies three paradoxical features:

(1) Pure violence as a pure means designates a ‘non-quality’, an absolute ‘zero-level’ of mythic violence, which is not simply non-violence but introduces a “critical violence”; it is a striking quality-less and “expression‎less” violence which interrupts like a “caesura” the fatefully oscillating course of law-making and law-preserving violence. (Cf. 340)

(2) The ‘agency’ or ‘activity’ of de-posing performs a reversal, a withdrawal of law from its application to bare life; this de-activating act indicates a movement of désœuvrement: an active passivity, an act of retreat dissolving, de-creating the application of law to bare life. Paradoxically, in the political event of de-posing of law a radical activity (“revolution”) coincides with a strikingly destructive, annihilating, and disastrous Event (“divine violence”) that can only be suffered.

(3) De-posing designates a “non-Event”, an ‘A-Event’, the temporality of which, as Hamacher comments, “does not conform to any known temporal form, and never to temporality as a form of positing; and one can say that this non-positing violence is contretemporal or anachronistic. Just as pure violence is pre-positional, it is also pre-temporal and thus not representable.” (Hamacher 1994, 112).

To account for this paradoxical structure, I am tempted to follow Hamacher’s reading of de-posing the law. As mentioned before, within the realm of law language becomes auto-performative.

“If one [...] characterizes law imposition in the terminology of speech-act theory as a performative act – and specifically as an absolute, preconventional performative act, one which posits conventions and legal conditions in the first place – and if one further calls the dialectic of positing and decay a dialectic of performance, it seems reasonable to term the ‘deposing’ of acts of positing and their dialectic, at least provisionally, as an absolute imperfomative or afformative political event, as depositive, as political a-thesis.” (Hamacher, 115)

The peculiar structure of the afformative can undo the auto-performative cycle of law and its application to bare life because it can account for the two mediums of pure means Benjamin mentions: language and politics.[16] In this sense, the proletarian general strike is the afformative a-thesis to all political acting based on the state and its mythic violence.

---

[1] This article is based on a paper presented at the “Historical Materialism” annual conference in London/UK, Nov. 13, 2010. I would like to thank Alison Hugill, Andrew McGettigan, Massimiliano Tomba, Stacy Douglas for their comments and critical remarks to earlier versions of this paper.

[2] See also Massimiliano Tomba on the genesis of the essay: “Benjamin’s text was conceived as part of a work entitled Politik, subdivided into two parts: the first titled ‘Der wahre Politiker’, of which the review by Paul Scheerbart is all that remains, and the second, entitled ‘Die wahre Politik’, in turn divided into two chapters, a) ‘Der Abbau der Gewalt’ and b) ‘Teleologie ohne Endzweck’. The first chapter is included in ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, while the second can be traced throughout the dense Theologish-politisches Fragment.”

[3] The German Parliament, the Bundestag, chose the word “authority” for the German “Staatsgewalt”, see https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/pdf/80201000.pdf, (Article 20).

[4] Étienne Balibar: “Violence”, in Historical Materialism¸17 (2009), p. 101.

[5] Benjamin-citations are taken from the editions Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bollock; Michael W. Jennings,, Cambridge, Mass., 4 vols., 1996ff. [henceforth abbreviated “SW, number of volume”], and Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Hermann Schweppenhäuser; Rolf Tiedemann, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 7 vols, 1972ff.

[6] Kant, Immanuel: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd ed. Hackett., translated by James W. Ellington, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1993,  pp. 30f.

[7] Cf. Hamacher, Werner: „Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’“, in Andrew Benjamin; Peter Osborne: Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, London; New York, 1994, pp. 110-138; here pp. 110f. [henceforth abbreviated “Hamacher 1994“].

[8] Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgement, § 15. “The judgment of taste is entirely independent from the concept of perfection.”

[9] Cf. Agamben, Giorgio: The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey, Stanford, 2005, pp. 131f.

[10] Georges Sorel: On Violence, quoted in Benjamin, SW 1, 246.

[11] In Cardozo Law Review, 1990 (Vol. 11), pp. 919ff.

[12] Cf. Kraft Werner: Tagebucheintrag vom 20.5.1934, in Werner Kraft: “Tagebucheintragungen. ed. by Volker Kahmen“, in Ingrid a. Konrad Scheurmann (eds.): Für Walter Benjamin. Dokumente, Essays und ein Entwurf, Frankfurt a. M. 1992, pp. 47f.

[13] In his fragment Capitalism as Religion (SW 1, 288-290) Benjamin identifies this principle also in capitalism; the ambiguity of the German word Schuld, which means moral guilt as well as economic debt, leads him to the polemical thesis that capitalism is a pure cult religion deprived of all theological traces.

[14] Consider for instance the following passage from World and Time, a fragment from around 1919: “In its present state, the social is a manifestation of spectral and demonic powers, often, admittedly in their greatest tension to God, their efforts to transcend themselves. The divine manifests itself in them only in revolutionary violence/force [Gewalt]. Only in the community [Gemeinschaft], nowhere in ‘social institutions,’ does the divine manifest itself either with violence/force [Gewalt] or without. (In this world, divine violence/force [Gewalt] is higher than divine nonviolence; in the world to come, divine nonviolence is higher than divine violence/force [Gewalt].” (227)

[15] Cf. Zizek, Slavoj: On Violence, New York, 2008, p. 172.

[16] For Hamacher’s fascinating elaboration on the nature of “afformative” see Hamacher, 1994, pp. 128f. (fn. 12).

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 http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org/1040

Walter Benjamin's "Critique of violence"

[Paper presented at Workshop on 멛iterature as Revolt in Twentieth Century Europe�, 18 August 1998, The University of Haifa, Israel (6^th ISSEI Conference)]

man cannot be said, at any price, to coincide with the mere life in him.

In terms of the European history of discourses on revolution, Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" belongs to the aftermath of the First World War. It formulates a poetics of violence in order to redress a poetics of shock. The shock was an overdetermined one. It encompassed Benjamin's conviction that the political institutions of parliamentary democracy in post-war Germany had failed to live up to the expectations with which they had been founded. It also incorporated an anxiety about the implications of forceful interventions on behalf of the state by those empowered by the state to a law-keeping function뾲he police ("a civil structure on a military model", as Derrida describes them).¹ Ironically, it's apocalyptic conclusion also presaged the rise to power in Germany of extreme right-wing reactionary forces and the form of pure violence unleashed as the final solution of the Holocaust. The resolutions Benjamin sought for his times were troubled ones; they continue to trouble our own. The basic problem he addressed was the relation between law and justice as it hinges on violence. In more specific terms, his essay addressed the question of whether violence in the social and political realms could be justified as pure means in itself, independent of whether it was applied to just or unjust ends. That included a consideration of the coercive violence represented by the general and the partial strike뾵hether treated as political or proletarian in origin뾞gainst the power of the state. This preoccupation was his response to the new reality produced by industrial relations in Weimar Germany. It was also a programmatic concern he shared with Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1915). The paradox of Benjamin's position was that he hoped to balance the ideology of proletarian violence represented by Marxism with the theology of divine violence represented by Judaic Messianism.

"Critique of Violence" (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) was written during late 1920 and early 1921.² Three aspects of the title need comment. In the German, the essay claims to be "on the critique of violence", which is rather a different thing to be claiming than what the conventional translation does. Secondly, we are advised to remember that `Gewalt' in German can mean `force', `power' or `might'뾡epending upon context뾲hough Benjamin's primary (indeed, even sole) referent is violence.³ The fortuity of this accidental pun is not without its own ironic violence. Also, the idea of critique needs grounding in Benjamin's other work of the period. In 1920, Benjamin had published his dissertation on "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism". From Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Schelling he learned to think of art as a form of reflection that enabled the finite to relate to the infinite, and of criticism as that which clarified that relation. This indebtedness was complicated, as Rodolphe Gasch� has shown, by Benjamin's rejection of their desacralization of the relation of art and criticism to "the Absolute". For him, "all critique must take place in view of... an Absolute that is absolutely transcendent, radically distinguished from everything profane or finite. Between it and the latter, no continuity is thinkable. Yet critique is a relating to such an absolute".⁴ This idea of a necessary onto-theological connection with the transcendent is also the apocalyptic conclusion of the "Critique of Violence". The realm of the transcendent, as immanent in language, has an even earlier genealogy in Benjamin. The 1916 essay, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" develops the claim that the representationality of language is the consequence of a fall from an originary adequacy of correspondence between language as a system of names and the essences of things as created by God. This belief provides a substratum for subsequent work, including "The Task of the Translator" (1921). In his next major essay, on "Goethe's Elective Affinities", completed shortly after the "Critique of Violence", "the business of critique" is defined in terms of the "excavation" of "the ideal of the problem". Critique is that which shows in the work of art "the virtual possibility of formulating the work's truth content as the highest philosophical problem".⁵ In his next major work, the study of German tragic drama of the baroque period, criticism is described as "the mortification of the works". This curious image is meant to distinguish the critical activity of reawakening the consciousness in living works from the "settlement of knowledge in dead ones".⁶

How might one transpose from these complex notions of critique in the realm of art to violence in all its manifestations? The Kantian conception of critique points to the ideal of autonomous judgment, and Benjamin shares some part of this legacy. He also appears close to Adorno's view of critique as emanating from intellectual freedom that has "the ability to distinguish what is known and what is accepted by convention", itself the outcome of "the power to resist established opinions and... also to resist existing institutions". This accords with Benjamin's undertaking, which may be described as proceeding under the belief, "in a variation of a famous proposition of Spinoza, that the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better".

⁷

On the theme of the relation between violence and revolution, Benjamin shared several inclinations with Sorel. One was the rejection of Utopianism뾦nterpreted rather narrowly by Sorel to mean the perpetual deferral of that which is promised to the electorate by politicians in parliamentary democracy. Secondly, Sorel was firm in his call for뾞nd Benjamin firm in his support for the idea of뾯evolutionary violence by the proletariat, not only in the form of strikes, but in the form of the general class war that was to bring down the bourgeoisie and the state. Thirdly, they both made a distinction between their concern with violence and the ideology of anarchism (even if Benjamin had some sympathy for special cases of ethical anarchism), because the violence of anarchism forfeit all validity if it did not accept its role as means. Fourth, both rejected the kind of violence that had characterized the French revolutionaries of 1893, because they felt it was based on natural law, according to which means were justified simply because they served natural human ends, such as self-preservation (and also, one might add, revenge, which Francis Bacon called "rough justice"). Benjamin contrasts natural law with positive law. Whereas natural law seeks to justify means, positive law tries to guarantee ends. Both must be transcended, according to Benjamin, but positive law at least distinguishes between sanctioned and unsanctioned force, thus providing a distinction between natural and legal ends. When conflicts of interest arise between the two, the pursuit of natural ends can threaten legality, and is legislated against. Not all types of conflict need violent resolutions. Benjamin regarded the strike used as part of the class struggle as an instance of "pure means".

The r�gime of violence derived from Marx by Sorel distinguished the term `violence' from `force':

The term violence should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.

⁸

The point of Sorel's distinction is that violence legitimized becomes force. Legitimation requires that those under the sway of force recognize (or misrecognize) it as endorsed by law. But before that can happen, for law to be established, there must first be the violence that makes the law. A contemporary fragment by Benjamin recognizes that if the state has the right to use force, "every use of its force stands in need of a particular law", and also that "the law's concern with justice is only apparent, whereas in truth the law is concerned with self-preservation" (9). At about the same time,

Max Weber defined the state as "the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate, violence".¹⁰ Benjamin adds organized labor to the nation state as the only legal subjects entitled in Europe to exercise violence. The many forms of violence sanctioned and reserved by the state for the state include militarism, conscription, the death penalty, and so on. On the theme of revolution, Benjamin teaches us to think of it as a specific kind of violence directed towards a law-making or law-positing function.

The new distinction Benjamin introduced in the "Critique of Violence" is between what he calls the mythic violence needed by the activity of law-making, and the law-preserving violence needed to maintain a state (or a state-of-affairs) created by the first kind of violence. Mythic violence is a manifestation of the power of fate over the human. Fate personified and pluralized gives us the gods, as in Greek myth, and the narratives we invent for these pagan gods are a way of humanizing the inscrutable force exercised over us and our puny freedom, a violence whose endurance is our destiny. Benjamin opposes this system with the Judaic-Messianic, in which true justice is promised and delivered in divine endmaking.

At this point I would like to introduce a slightly different perspective on some of the issues raised by Benjamin. In the chapter "Of Divine Law" from the Theologico-Political Tractatus, Spinoza distinguished between the laws we obey as a consequence of our nature, and the laws we make. The latter, he felt, are more properly named as ordinances. Law refers to the predetermined and universal in nature. Their sanction may be said to reside in God. A challenge to these would be a contradiction in terms, since, as part of nature, we can access its laws, but we can hardly change them. Ordinances, in contrast, are human in decree and sanction. To challenge them is to offer violence, and when this is offered on behalf of other뻴et to be promulgated뻚ecrees, we have revolution. Revolution, we might say, is the purposive violence that precedes the formation of a state which is either created as a direct outcome of that violence, or which fails of realization (in which case, the revolution may be said to have failed).

The most remarkable feature of the "Critique of Violence" is how, in a final swerve, the argument translates what might have seemed, until then, a secular and political discussion about law and justice into the language of Messianism and the divine law. But, as Benjamin's views on language make clear, what looks like a swerve was always already immanent in his approach to the notion of law. The onto-theological impulse in Benjamin cannot be seen as something overlaid or twisted by a subsequently acquired Marxism. It is the shaping force of his interest in justice. In the final analysis, according to Benjamin, the justification of means depends on fate and the justness of ends upon God, by which he means a Messianic God. True justice belongs to "the world to come"; whereas, in this world, we can only have justification.

This recognition that the making and conserving of laws has little to do with justice has been widely noticed in the history of European discourses on legality and power. Derrida, for instance, invokes Pascal, who invoked Montaigne before him: "And so laws keep up their good standing, not because they are just, but because they are laws: that is the mystical foundation of their Authority".¹¹ Derrida has given the self-deconstructive aspect of the division between law-making and law-conserving a reading that argues that the two kinds of violence cannot be kept apart. Cases such as war, strikes, or police violence show how the distinction between the foundation and conservation of law can get blurred. Law-making violence is forced into "self-conserving repetition", and "Conservation in its turn refounds, so that it can conserve what it claims to found". Both notions suffer what he calls a "differential contamination"; neither can be kept purely itself. It must be said, however, that Benjamin does not lack awareness of this tendency. If he never gives up "trying to contain in a pair of concepts and to bring back down to distinctions the very thing that incessantly exceeds them and surpasses them",¹² the reason is the form of a will to believe that many뾦ncluding Derrida뾪ay not share, but which, nonetheless, has its own justification.

This justification is based on Benjamin's view that political institutions decay when the revolutionary violence that founded them ceases to be a force in their propulsion in time. History is thus simply the decay of force. A short fragment written by Benjamin in 1919-20 claims, gnomically, that

In the revelation of the divine, the world뾲he theatre of history뾦s subjected to a great process of decomposition, while time뾲he life of him who represents it뾦s subjected to a great process of fulfillment. The end of the world: the destruction and liberation of a (dramatic) representation. Redemption of history from the one who represents it. /But perhaps in this sense the profoundest antithesis to "world" is not "time" but "the world to come".

¹³

The swerve from the secular world of history to the divine realm that is the termination of history comes about in Benjamin as a consequence of his life-long conviction that the world of time and history is a fallen world, subject to decay, in which there is only the delusion of progress, and from which there is no redemption except, as "Critique of Violence" claims, in" pure divine violence". One might object that if "pure" is to be applied to violence, "pure violence" has to mean violence seen purely as means, without reference to ends뾭recisely that which divine violence is not in Benjamin, since it has the end in mind of bringing time and history to a stop. Be that as it may, Benjamin posits a dialectical oscillation in which the decay of one structure of law is superseded by another and another, in a series that has no end except the end of time, no justice except in the bloodless violence of the end of history. While mythic violence brings guilt and retribution, the divine violence Benjamin would like to believe in offers expiation. Despite Derrida's pointed horror at how much this vision of expiation appears to him to correspond with the Holocaust, it is difficult not to sympathize with the kinds of objection raised to his reproach of Benjamin by Gillian Rose and others.¹⁴ So by the end of "Critique of Violence", Benjamin has translated the issue from the plane of history to that of redemption from history. He believes that only when legality in the profane sense has been abolished, will the true revolution succeed, and this revolution will be "lethal without spilling blood".¹⁵

As a performative act, Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" is a strange and estranging argument for the interpenetration of the sublime and the terrifying. While his elective affinities obviously suggest an affiliation to the Judaic, I am tempted to say that his critique of violence is also very German in the manner in which, in 1965, Adorno (after much reluctant demurring) answered the question "What is German?" with the claim that "If one is permitted to speculate that something is specifically German, then it is this interpenetration of what is magnificent, not contenting itself with any conventional boundaries, with what is monstrous".

¹⁶

You will have gathered that I find it monstrous and sublime of Benjamin to insist that the only true revolution in this world뾵hich is synonymous for him with the only true justice in this world뾠onsists in the ending of this world as we know it, for another realm posited for us through that violence which founds revelation. The posthumous life of Benjamin's "Critique" is thus both relevant, and a limit condition of relevance, for Europe since 1921, and especially for Europe since 1945. Not everyone뾫ot today뾵ill live with his kind of revelation, and most of our notions of revolution will have to do with much less than the rigor of what Benjamin posits, so violently.Notes

1 Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The `Mystical Foundation of Authority'", in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 44.

2 Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 236-53.

3 Derrida, "Force of Law", 6; Werner Hamacher, "Afformative, Strike: Benjamin's `Critique of Violence'", in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 127.

4 Rodolphe Gasch�, "The Sober Absolute: Walter Benjamin and the Early Romantics", in David S. Ferris (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 72-3.

5 Ibid., 334.

6 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, with an introduction by George Steiner (London: Verso, 1977), 182.

7 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 281-82, 288.

8 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915), 195.

9 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 231-32.

                          10 In Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 35.

                          11 Derrida, "The Force of Law", 12.

                          12 Ibid., 38, 42, 44.

                          13 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 226.

14 Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1993, 81-84; Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 68-9; also see Ralf Rogowski, "The Paradox of Law and Violence: Modern and Postmodern Readings of Benjamin's `Critique of Violence'', New Comparisons 18 (Autumn 1994), 131-51.

                           15 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 249-50.

16 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models, 208.

http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellpatke/Benjamin/benjamin_violence.htm

Walter Benjamin
	On the Concept of History
	(often referred to as…)
	Theses on the Philosophy of History
	I
	The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
	II
	‘One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,’ writes Lotze, ‘is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.’ Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.
	III
	A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.
	IV
	Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.
	Hegel, 1807
	The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.
	V
	The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)
	VI
	To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
	VII
	Consider the darkness and the great cold In this vale which resounds with mystery.
	Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
	To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: ‘Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.’* The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
	* ‘Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.’
	VIII  The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
	IX
	My wing is ready for flight,   I would like to turn back.If I stayed timeless time,  I would have little luck.	Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zurück, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich hätte wenig Glück.   Gerherd Scholem,  ‘Gruss vom Angelus’
	A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
	X
	The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm‎ their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis’, and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.
	XI
	The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program * already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as ‘the source of all wealth and all culture.’ Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ‘…the man who possesses no other property than his labor power’ must of necessity become ‘the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners…’ However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: ‘The savior of modern times is called work. The …improvement… of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.’ This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.
	*The Gotha Congress of 1875 'United the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’
	XII
	We need history, but not the way a spoiled  loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.
	Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History
	Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group,* has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
	* Leftist group, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of World War I in opposition to the pro-war policies of the German Socialist party, later absorbed by the Communist party.
	XIII
	Every day our cause becomes clearer  and people get smarter.
	Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie
	Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
	XIV
	Origin is the goal.
	Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1
	History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
	* Benjamin says ‘Jetztzeit’ and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, that is, present. He clearly is thinking of the mystical nunc stans.
	XV
	The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:
	Who would have believed it!   we are told that new Joshuasat the foot of every tower,   as though irritated with   time itself, fired at the dials  in order to stop the day.	Qui le croirait! on dit,  qu’irrités contre l’heure  De nouveaux Josués  au pied de chaque tour, Tiraient sur les cadrans  pour arrêter le jour. *
	XVI
	A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
	XVII
	Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled*; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
	*The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel.
	XVIII
	‘In relation to the history of organic life on earth,’ writes a modem biologist, ‘the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.’ The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
	A.
	Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
	B
	The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

Walter Benjamin (1936)

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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Source: UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.

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“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931
Le Conquete de l’ubiquite

Preface

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

I

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence:

“Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

II

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. 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. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his 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. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.”

Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

III

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt – and, perhaps, saw no way – to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. 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 image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, 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. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable 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.

IV

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression‎ in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position.)

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

V

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

VI

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression‎ of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

VII

The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early theories of the film. Abel Gance, for instance, compares the film with hieroglyphs: “Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression‎ of the Egyptians ... Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it. There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses.” Or, in the words of Séverin-Mars: “What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression‎. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience.” Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy about the silent film with the question: “Do not all the bold descriptions we have given amount to the definition of prayer?” It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it – with a striking lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were published, films like L’Opinion publique and The Gold Rush had already appeared. This, however, did not keep Abel Gance from adducing hieroglyphs for purposes of comparison, nor Séverin-Mars from speaking of the film as one might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico. Characteristically, even today ultrareactionary authors give the film a similar contextual significance – if not an outright sacred one, then at least a supernatural one. Commenting on Max Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Werfel states that undoubtedly it was the sterile copying of the exterior world with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, motorcars, and beaches which until now had obstructed the elevation of the film to the realm of art. “The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities ... these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.”

VIII

The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

IX

For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. “The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence .... The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.” This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film “the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible ... ” In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw “the latest trend ... in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and... inserted at the proper place.” With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.

X

The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. These arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin or Ivens’ Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of contemporary literature.

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

All this can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

XI

The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. – unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

XII

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. 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. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses.

Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression‎ of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.

XIII

The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective. The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.

By close-ups of the 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 have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the 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 entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. 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 resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

XIV

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions – though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Before a painting of Arp’s or a poem by August Stramm it is impossible to take time for contemplation and eval‎uation as one would before a canvas of Derain’s or a poem by Rilke. In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.

From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.

XV

The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie “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.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.

The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. 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. The laws of its reception are most instructive.

Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval‎ times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. 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. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. 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.

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. 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. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. 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 examiner, but an absent-minded one.

Epilogue

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. 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 of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: 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. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, 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 materrial. 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.

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm