by Mike O’Brien
Once again, I found myself torn in several directions trying to choose a topic for this piece. I try not to be too current, but also not too esoteric. I considered writing about A.I. generated video games, end-of-life care for pets (unfortunately quite topical in our house), and the overly formal and stylistic definitions of fascism in the popular press. Overwhelmed, I reached to the bookshelf for something less ad hoc, something that could afford some comforting distance from the present moment, while also enhancing perception through a parallax view. (I have been partial to optical analogies ever since taking an exceptionally good course on pre-modern theories of optics by Dr. Stephen Menn at McGill. Holding MA and PhD degrees in both philosophy and mathematics, with a command of ancient languages and a gift for exegetical reading, I am still impressed by his teaching some twenty years later.)
I landed on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction”. It mostly recommended itself by its brevity; the titular essay runs only fifty pages in its slim Penguin Classics edition. I first became aware of Benjamin through Giorgio Agamben’s writing during my late 2000’s edgy political theory days, when theology, linguistics and theatrical criticism blended together in a haze of intriguingly oblique but often flatly ridiculous text (insert “Verso monograph ” joke here). The title of this work promised some strikingly prescient anticipations of the current debates over the role of generative A.I. in art and culture. It was not to be, insofar as Benjamin’s concern with art’s impact on audiences does not speak so readily to concerns about the impact of A.I. art on artists or its use for automated forgeries. It did, rather unexpectedly, lend itself more readily to questions about the differences between film and video games, and to the topic of aesthetic vs substantive critiques of fascism. (Benjamin, as a writer, a Marxist, and a Jew, found fascism inescapable in its ubiquity and in its enmity towards his identities. He killed himself in 1940, five years after the essay’s publication, when he was captured in Spain while trying to flee to America via Portugal, believing that he would be deported to France and handed over to the Nazis.)
The essay begins with a quote from Paul Valéry, the prolific French writer, reproducing the opening paragraph his 1928 essay “La conquête de l’ubiquité” (unhelpfully cited as belonging to the 250-page collection of his essays “Pièces sur l’art” without further specification; I suppose one is just supposed to know these things, or not bother trying to find them). Addressing the technological changes in the physical production of art, it ends: “Neither matter nor space nor time is what, up until twenty years ago, it always was. We must be prepared for such profound changes to alter the entire technological aspect of the arts, influencing invention itself as a result, and eventually, it may be, contriving to alter the very concept of art in the most magical fashion”. Beyond the quoted section, Valéry continues to discuss how the reproduction and transmission of art will be the first aspects to be revolutionized by technology, and how works of art will acquire an ubiquity, appearing at any time and place where someone with the necessary devices wills it. Drawing comparisons to the distribution of water, gas and electricity, Valéry muses “I do not know if any philosopher has dreamed of a corporation for the distribution of Sensible Reality at home”.
Valéry points out that music is (at his time) best suited to these new means, and its liberation from constraints of place and occasion (and, unspoken but undoubtedly true, the equipment, skill and time of musicians) allows listeners to entertain their moods as they wish. Just as important for the art itself, the recording and transmission of music allows this art to be heard in a setting more akin to that in which it was composed, i.e. occasioned by feeling and inspiration rather than scheduled for a public event. (In another Valéry essay, “L’esprit du politique”, he touches on the downside of the constant, ubiquitous flow of instantaneous information. “Who then is the thinker, the philosopher, the historian yet the most profound, yet the most wise and most erudite, who would today risk making the least prophecy?” Indeed, M. Valéry, indeed.)
At another pole, Benjamin cites the French critic Georges Duhamel, who saw the accessibility and ubiquity of entertainment (one doubts he would call it “art”) as a degrading and dangerous force. Or at least that’s the impression he gives of American cinemas in 1929, as related in his travelogue “Scènes de la vie future”. “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.” (Thankfully, Duhamel never lived to see the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) He does make some concessions, however: “The seats are good enough. American comfort. The comfort of bottoms. A purely tactile and muscular comfort”. Duhamel is sometimes credited with creating the French penchant for anti-Americanism, and if most French people of his day only knew America through his eyes, it is easy to see why.
Benjamin’s essay is neither as sanguine as Valéry nor as bilious as Duhamel in these matters. He recognized the significance of these new cultural technologies, especially in the particular case of film, as something in play for good or for ill. He saw the dangerous potential for film as a mass propaganda tool for fascism, and against it (“The Work of Art…” was first published in French the same year as Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” was released). While the bulk of Benjamin’s essay deals with aesthetic ideas, it is explicitly political in its framing and intentions, giving its purpose as the introduction of concepts that “differ from more familiar ones in that they are quite useless for the purposes of Fascism” (italics in original). These “more familiar ones”, such as “creativity and genius, everlasting value and secrecy”, are disrupted by systems of artistic creation operating not only by reproduction, but also for reproduction; a movie is not merely copied, but conceived from the beginning as something that will be copied, and whose intended audience will only ever experience copies of it.
Benjamin identifies “genuineness” with the material properties and traditional history of a work; it was made by so-and-so out of such-and-such materials at some time, possessed by a succession of owners in known places, and persists as that particular object with that particular history. A Renaissance painting may have been copied by the original artist, or by apprentices under their command, but in numbers small enough that these copies, too, have a traceable identity. The technological constraints on painting production were such that the concepts of genuineness, originality and forgery had some stable meaning. With photography, the near-instantaneous capturing of an image is effected without the kind of intentional labour of the painter’s hand (though not without intentional labour of other kinds, and the post-capture steps of producing a print can require much hands-on work as well). In its most basic execution, however, the artist’s organ is the eye rather than the hand. If someone were to sneak into the artist’s studio and snap a picture of the same scene, under the same lighting, with the same equipment, and develop the film with the same techniques, would it make sense to call this forgery? Would it make sense to say it was not genuine, despite every discernible physical property being identical? It is not simply that this question has a different answer than in the case of a forged painting; the technological shift in how images are created, reproduced and received destabilizes the concepts which make the question intelligible.
The reproductions of works such as photographic prints and audio-visual recordings are capable of displacement and presence not possible for the “original”. Imagine a modern multi-track music recording; it can be displaced from its origins to be present to an audience in a living room, or an elevator, or a single person cycling through a park. Not only could the original performance not be present in these ways, it was never present anywhere; the performers were never all together at once, and never played the sequence of sounds heard in the recording. (The same is even more true in contrasting stage and film acting, and Benjamin explores this at length). The shift towards art being experienced primarily through copies displaces the “actuality” of the work, and the presence of a reproduction is no longer a (lesser) substitute for the presence of the “genuine” work. Benjamin says that this shift “actualizes” the work by allowing people to experience it in their own setting, getting closer to the reproductions than they ever could to the original. This applies to natural objects as well, both through the reproductive possibilities of visual recording, and through the optical possibilities of the recording instruments. Not only can an audience witness a volcano on some remote island that they could not visit, but (thanks to zoom lenses and editing blow-ups) they can witness it from a perspective that would have them burnt to ashes if they tried to achieve it “genuinely”.
Benjamin’s comments about film remind me of some more recent comments about the possibilities afforded by video games (so do Duhamel’s, in a more grumpy, Luddite fashion). Benjamin notes that film can encompass all other forms of art, as we can see a painting and hear a symphony within a film, or inhabit the perspective of the camera lens as it moves through a cathedral. What (some) video games, or more broadly speaking “playable media”, afford is control of that perspective. A game might take place within a perfect reproduction of the Louvre, but if the player is forced along a certain path at a certain pace, most of that presence is wasted. In this respect, the Ubisoft series of “Assassin’s Creed” games are particularly apt to aesthetic appreciation, combining painstaking recreations of historical architecture with acrobatic abilities that allow the character to gain nearly any perspective. Of course, “freelook” and “noclip” cheat codes have afforded the same freedom to video gamers for decades, albeit within worlds not usually intended to be appreciated so freely. Would Benjamin subsume video games under the category of film? I suspect that he might resist, identifying film with photography and grouping video games with animation.
Benjamin argues that art originally had a cult value, as opposed to an appreciation value. The magical power of a shrouded idol, seen only by a select few or perhaps by nobody at all, has its residue in the “aura” of genuineness adhering to artworks. Art was made for gods, or spirits, or ancestors, and its function had nothing to do with appreciation by a human audience. As mass culture became more important, considerations of how art is produced for a mass audience, and how it is appreciated by the same, overshadowed the cult value of art. Against this, “art for art’s sake” became the credo of those who rejected the appreciation value of art, and sought to insulate “genuine” art from the emerging dynamics of mass society. When genuineness began to fail as a criterion in art production, the role of ritual in underpinning art was replaced, says Benjamin, by politics.
I must skip over much in the middle of the essay that is fascinating but not essential to Benjamin’s political point. This may seem abrupt, but mirrors the structure of his essay: a directly political foreword and afterword, with a million aesthetic detours between them. Many of his insights and premonitions are borne out by the lived reality of technologically advanced societies, and do not need to be spelled out for this audience. Some others retain their revelatory value still, but do not rise above the merely aesthetic. However, a few zingers bear repeating in the era of social media (remember that these were published in 1935) : “All persons today can stake a claim to being filmed“… “The reader is constantly ready to become a writer”… “Literary authority is no longer grounded in specialist education but in polytechnic education; it has become common property”. These quotes refer to the masses’ increasing access to, and representation by, the text publishing apparatus of Benjamin’s day. He notes that such representation occurs in Soviet film, where workers often portrayed themselves, but not in Western Europe (nor, presumably, the United States) “where capitalist exploitation of film bars modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced from being taken into consideration”. (What would he make of YouTube?)
Benjamin claims that film accomplishes what Dadaist art attempted, disrupting the audience’s experience with shock. The Dadaists shocked with content and subversions of style. The film shocks by manipulating the viewpoint of the audience and preventing the static contemplation of the work. As the audience identifies with the camera lens, it is thrown about through quick edits and changes of focus. (Benjamin says that “Film is the art form that corresponds to the heightened state of mortal peril that modern man must face”, its shocks like those “felt by every pedestrian in city traffic…”.) Duhamel complains of film “I can no longer think what I wish to think. The moving images have ousted my thoughts.” The moral shock accomplished by Dadaism is outdone by the forceful perceptual and mental shock accomplished by film.
What is the political importance of film’s shock effect, according to Benjamin? He claims that film is an instrument for reception within a state of distraction, and as such is best suited to meet audiences in that state (indeed, kept in that state by conditions not of their making or choosing). The argument linking this closing observation of the main essay to the afterword’s political points is not obvious. Benjamin says that fascism seeks to give the masses a voice, without changing the ownership structures under which they labour. “Fascism leads logically to an aestheticization of political life“. Presumably because politics must be removed from facts in order to preserve the facts unchanged, while claiming to have changed politics. “All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war”. This proceeds from the idea that the productive logic of industry is held back by peacetime economics, and yearns to be fully actualized in the all-out production/destruction of war. This seems less crazy the more I think about it. (For a shorter and punchier illustration of this point, see the music video for Pearl Jam’s “Do The Evolution”.)
Benjamin claims that the aestheticization of politics leaves an alienated humanity savouring the spectacle of its own destruction (I think he rather overstates the masses’ consciousness of their own circumstances, and the causal power of aesthetics). He concludes: “That is how things are, given the aestheticization of politics that Fascism pursues. Communism’s reply is to politicize art“. Well, that and killing five million Nazis. But that more decisive reply did not begin until the year after Benjamin’s death. Eighty-four years on, is the anti-“woke” panic of today’s fascists a vindication of Benjamin’s call to politicize art? Or is their panic just a feigned pretext for another great extermination?