Abstract
This article evaluates the role of art – particularly mechanically reproduced forms of art – in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. The central claim is that both thinkers share the same conviction as to the emancipatory potentials of the work of art. Yet, they evaluate the effects of technological innovation differently. The underpinnings of this later resolved discord, however, are philosophical. In contrast to Benjamin’s belief in the possibility of mass mobilization, for Adorno the relevant category remains unequivocally the individual subject.
The Enlightenment sealed the fate of art in the last three centuries. When it divided the world firmly between reason and passion, fiction and fact, the Enlightenment banished art from the realm of objective knowledge. When the Enlightenment philosophers dealt with art, it was treated as ‘a pedagogical tool, a means of moral persuasion’. 1 In Marxist tradition, in particular, art became an instrument of political instruction. The Romanticism of the 18th century, in reaction to Enlightenment reason, embraced art as the expression of individual will, but it did not challenge this assumption of the Enlightenment. In the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, this dualism is abolished to make room for aesthetic experience as a form of dialectical and materialist cognition.
Why would two prominent thinkers in the Hegelian–Marxist tradition take up the question of art, which as a part of the superstructure is considered only trivial in orthodox Marxism? First, both thinkers reject the central tenet of Hegelian philosophy: the idea of progress as the materialization of reason and the gradual betterment of the world. Second, both Adorno and Benjamin consider Marxism a methodology. They employ negative dialectics to address the problems of contemporary society. In the context of post-First World War Europe, this attitude required questioning the status of the proletariat as the agent of emancipation. It necessitated conceptualizing new forms of relating to nature. In this context, according to Adorno, ‘aesthetic experience was in fact the more adequate form of cognition, because in it subject and object, idea and nature, reason and sexual experience were interrelated without either pole getting the upper hand’. 2
In this article, I evaluate the role of art – particularly mechanically reproduced forms of art – in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno. Not only does the intellectual affinity of the two thinkers but also their personal friendship render this enterprise interesting. Their writings, which proceed in conversation with one another, shed light on the common philosophical and methodological assumptions of the Frankfurt School as well as its discords. My central claim is that both thinkers share the same conviction as to the emancipatory potentials of the work of art. Yet, they evaluate the effects of technological innovation differently. The underpinnings of this later resolved discord, however, are philosophical. In contrast to Benjamin’s belief in the possibility of mass mobilization, for Adorno the relevant category remains the individual subject.
Benjamin’s idea of progress
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ is Benjamin’s last extant piece of writing. 3 During the last winter of his life, in early 1940, Benjamin wrote 18 short theses, which embody his last reflections on two strains of thought that he had tried to reconcile throughout his entire life: Jewish Messianic thought and historical materialism. 4 The theses present two images: progress, a barbaric ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’, and the rupture that will ‘blast open the continuum of history’, through which the past can be redeemed. 5
Benjamin depicts progress with reference to a cherished Paul Klee painting, Angelus Novus. 6 The painting
… 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This 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. 7
The portrayal illustrates Benjamin’s perception of progress as a forward movement, brutal, catastrophic and inhumane: ‘the continuum of the history consists in the permanence of the unbearable; progress is the eternal return of the catastrophe.’ 8 Not only does progress have a tremendous force, but it also looks natural and inevitable. This notion of progress erases the possibility of alternative courses of history; it makes fascism appear as a ‘historical norm’. 9 It knits the web of the history so tight that this narrative can be convincingly presented as that of the human civilization. But Benjamin reveals the real nature of progress: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ 10
Benjamin’s observation has two important implications. The first one is philosophical and concerns the tradition of historical materialism. The greatest of obstacles to the revolution, according to orthodox Marxist diagnosis, was ‘the reification which made reality appear as “second nature” rather than historically produced’. 11 The potential route to emancipation therefore required the de-stabilization of the appearance of reality. With his insight into the nature of history, Benjamin shifted the focus to the appearance of progress. The emancipation now required de-mystification of the illusory notion of progress, a task that Horkheimer and Adorno would later take up in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. 12 The second implication is rather political. This new shift in focus subjected to critique the Social Democrats, who, according to Benjamin, shared the same illusion of the progress of ‘mankind’. 13 This conformist attitude dominated the Social Democrats and helped fascism prosper. 14
Benjamin observes that the concept of progress as an irresistible straight march into the future is sustained by a ‘homogeneous, empty’ notion of time. While progress seems natural and inevitable, its true nature is brutal and totalitarian. However, it would be possible to pull down its mask and expose its true nature. In order to accomplish this, we must first reject the notion of a universal history. Then we must realize that ‘history is the subject of a structure, whose site is … time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]’. 15 The past presents itself to us, but only momentarily. If we can hold on to that ‘image of the past’ we may be able to construct a narrative of history that can ‘make the continuum of history explode’. 16 This explosion produces a crack in homogeneous, empty time, opening up the possibility of what Benjamin calls ‘a Messianic cessation of happening’. He argues:
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 crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters 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 homogeneous 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. 17
According to Benjamin, rather than being unitary and homogeneous, the nature of history is fragmented. Instead of subscribing to a narrative view of history, which presents events as the beads of a rosary that follow one another in progression in empty, homogenous time, historians must realize that each particular period in history, including the present one, forms a particular relation, a ‘constellation’ to the previous ones. If we fail to do that, we risk neglecting the alternative images of history. Those images, which are not recognized by the present, are doomed to disappear irretrievably. Our task is to ‘find the constellation of awakening’, ‘the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been’. 18 Only in the now-time, in the moment in which the true historical time crystallizes, can we seize the opportunity to grasp the lived experiences of the past and redeem our past in its fullness.
The notion of redeeming the past as a basis for the future and the realization of redemption by exploding the continuum of history is derived from modern Jewish Messianism, which had a strong influence on Benjamin’s thought. 19 Rabinbach argues that there are four aspects to the Jewish Messianic tradition: the restorative, the utopian and the apocalyptic dimensions, and an ethical ambivalence. 20 The restorative aspect reinstates the ideal content of the past, which constitutes the basis for the future. In order to evoke the past, we need to access its lost utopian content. Hence this feature emphasizes the importance of knowledge, which in the modern Jewish Messianic tradition ‘is thus linked, not to power, but to the triumph of redemption’. 21 The second, utopian aspect envisions a utopia that possesses a new unity and transparency, which has not hitherto existed. ‘Redemption’, accordingly, can be realized in this perspective, ‘either as the end of history or as an event within history, never as an event produced by history’. 22 The apocalyptic dimension opposes historical immanence and conceives the redemption as a complete negation of the old order. The strong influence of Kabbalah is undoubtedly discerned in Benjamin’s focus on the possibility of redemption only in the now-time. It is the moment in which the past can be grasped in its whole and the alternative trajectories that have been rendered impossible by the progress of history can be reclaimed.
Gershom Scholem emphasizes the importance of the very brief and quickly disappearing nature of redemptive moments in Benjamin’s work. 23 If the vision for redemption in Benjamin is dependent on seizing the fleeting Messianic chips of time, then, what are the revolutionary prospects? Here, once again, Benjamin seems to share the ambivalence of the Jewish Messianic tradition. While the future is full of expectations, Benjamin is highly pessimistic about the possibility of this-worldly salvation. Although his visionary thinking carries the hope of redemption, this is a feeble hope. He believes that every generation is endowed with the claim to Messianic power, but it is a ‘weak’ claim, and it ‘cannot be settled cheaply’. 24
To sum up, redemption lies in our ability in the now-time to grasp the last gaze of Angelus Novus and seize the opportunity to open the Messianic gate. How does this vision appear in Adorno’s writings?
Art as the gaze of Angelus Novus
Within the larger project of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the aim of which is ‘to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’, the work of art occupies a marginal place compared with the social critique that the project was intended for. 25 Despite this minor role, art has a central significance in the totally administered society, thanks to its particular ‘magical’ nature. More specifically, I argue that the work of art for Horkheimer and Adorno is the realization of Benjamin’s now-time, through which a Messianic cessation can occur: Art is the gaze of Angelus Novus. Let me start by briefly analysing the project of Enlightenment as critically evaluated by Horkheimer and Adorno, and trace the origins and nature of art in this critique.
Horkheimer and Adorno begin their analysis by an indictment of Enlightenment rationality:
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. 26
Scientific knowledge put humankind into positions of power and established ‘man’ as the master of nature as well as other human beings. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is concerned with this process of de-mystification, the consequence of which is not only the domination of nature, but also the destruction of reason and the denial of the autonomous individual. In order to uncover this process, which they identify as ‘regression’, Horkheimer and Adorno engage in a genealogy of history, an analysis of the dialectical relationship between myth and Enlightenment rationality.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the human fear of the unknown is the foundation of knowledge: ‘Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown.’ 27 Human beings attempted to solve the puzzles of nature in an attempt to prevent ‘being absorbed by otherness’. 28 They brought nature and past human experience into the limits of human knowledge in order to serve the ends of progress. Knowledge ‘liberate[d] the present from the power of the past by banishing the latter beyond the absolute boundary of the irrecoverable and placing it, as usable knowledge, in the service of the present’. 29
Let me underline the affinity of this perception of progress with Benjamin’s thinking. Benjamin, as demonstrated above, was also concerned with the irretrievable disappearance of the images of the past. He believed that redemption was possible only through reclaiming the past. 30 Hence, Horkheimer and Adorno concur with Benjamin that the humankind can be redeemed only as long as the progress does not erase the knowledge of the past. How is this redemption possible? Here, the work of art enters the theory.
Before myth, there was magic. Unlike in science, in magic the human effort to master nature was directed to mimesis – likeness to nature. 31 Magic did not sunder appearance from the essence; it aimed at the entirety. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, art is deeply bound to this heritage of magic:
It is in the nature of the work of art, of aesthetic illusion, to be what was experienced as a new and terrible event in the magic of primitives: the appearance of the whole in particular. The work of art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura. As an expression of totality art claims the dignity of absolute. 32
Thanks to this magical nature, in art, the whole is still retained in the particular. Art allows the subject to experience the totality of reality. In art, the past has not yet been dissected, fragmented and rendered a tool in the service of progress. Instead, in the artwork, the past is living, vivid and whole. ‘As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge, and thus exclude itself from praxis’, art will keep its privileged position to have a hold over the past and therefore over the history of humanity in its entirety. 33
This is why Horkheimer and Adorno treat the Sirens’ song in Odyssey as the authentic work of art. When Odysseus sails through his dangerous adventures, when ‘[w]hat Odysseus has left behind him has passed into the world of shades’, the Sirens’ song comes with the power of the work of art, invoking the bygone memories and tempting Odysseus and his men to lose themselves in the past:
Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past. … [T]he Sirens’ song has not yet been deprived of power as art. They have knowledge ‘of all that has happened on this fruitful earth’ and especially of what has befallen Odysseus himself. … By directly invoking the recent past, and with the irresistible promise of pleasure which their song contains, the Sirens threaten the patriarchal order, which gives each person back their life only in exchange for their full measure of time. … If the Sirens know everything that has happened, they demand the future as its price … 34
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the work of art carries the past in itself. In the work of art, the now-time [Jetztzeit] becomes realized. The work of art allows the viewer to hold on to the past, or as Benjamin argues ‘to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’. 35
If the unraveling of the past in a crystallized monad is one aspect of Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit, the other aspect is the redemptive potential for a future that is opened in the now-time. Does the work of art carry the same redemptive potential in Dialectic of Enlightenment? Before answering this question, let us first consider Benjamin’s analysis of art, especially in modern society.
Technical possibilities of artistic reproduction
In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) Benjamin set out to study the impact of techniques of mechanical reproduction ̶̶̶̶̶̶ photography and film ̶̶̶̶̶̶ on the work of art, an article that he believed ‘made a thrust in the direction of materialist theory of art’. 36 Benjamin’s thesis is that mechanical reproducibility has massively transformed the status of art, a transformation that affects both its function and the mode of its reception.
The key to this transformation is found in the concept of ‘aura’, the source of authenticity and authority of an artwork. According to Benjamin, in the age of mechanical reproduction, the aura of the work of art disappears. Benjamin welcomes the destruction of aura. The aura of the artwork emphasized its originality and uniqueness. 37 The disappearance of aura, in this sense, liberates the work of art from its ties to the tradition, within which the integration of art found expression only in the service of the ritual. This transformation is all-important. The moment art is emancipated ‘from its parasitical dependence in ritual’, it acquires a new function, which Benjamin perceives as politicization of art: ‘Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.’ 38 The question of how this politicization affects the reception of art will be discussed shortly, but let me first discuss another tendency that Benjamin observes in the nature of the technically reproducible art.
In this essay, Benjamin considers the technical innovation in the mechanical production of art in general, but grants a special importance to film. According to Benjamin, film introduces an extended opportunity for discovering the hidden potential (for emancipation) in the everyday life:
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. … 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. 39
‘The Work of Art’ essay is a part of Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’, a study of the Paris arcades of the 19th century. In this ‘panorama of dialectical images’, 40 Benjamin was interested in the particular, singular, profane, everyday objects and their stories. ‘The Arcades Project’ presented fragments of history, a constellation of images with the aim of ‘rescuing the phenomena from temporal extinction’. 41 The fact that ‘The Thesis on the Philosophy of History’ of 1940 was written as a theoretical introduction to ‘The Arcades Project’, which Benjamin never brought to completion, reveals the connection between Benjamin’s lifetime project and the potential role of film. With the extended possibilities of exploring the everyday objects in a new light, Benjamin believed that film was a new, suitable and powerful tool for redeeming the profane.
Apart from a transformation in the nature of the work of art, the destruction of aura results in a corresponding change in the nature and reception of art. Technical reproduction allows the work of art to enter milieux that would be out of the reach of the original. In this way, ‘it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway’; ‘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.’ 42 The consequence of this new potential, according to Benjamin, is the collectivization of the experience of art. Unlike the painting, for example, which was produced for the enjoyment of one person or a few people, the new mechanically reproducible forms of art – and especially film – can be consumed by the masses. Benjamin recognizes that in this collective reception and consumption of art, there is a tendency that is ‘both instructive and critical’. 43 How so?
Film creates a shock effect that did not exist in the same way in previous forms of art:
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. … 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 … 44
There are two facets of the shock effect. On the one hand, the shock effect ‘releases experiences which formerly had been locked up in its esoteric style’. 45 It introduces the viewer to a whole new set of experiences that was not accessible to the consumer of previous forms of art. The shock effect, hence, removes the work of art from the realm designated to it by the bourgeois culture. On the other hand, the mechanical reproduction changes the reactionary attitude of the masses to ‘progressive reaction’ – ‘characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert’. 46 Such transformation in the reception of the work of art, concludes Benjamin, is ‘of great social significance’. 47 The technological innovation opens up the work of art to numerous possible uses and endows it with a new revolutionary potential.
Adorno’s skepticism
Adorno’s first reaction to Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ was expectedly critical. Adorno was about to finish his essay on the commodity character of jazz – an essay that would provide the model for Adorno’s later critique of the culture industry. 48 Reflecting in this essay upon the mass culture himself, Adorno was discontented with Benjamin’s uncritical acknowledgment of film as an art form and criticized Benjamin for not taking into account ‘the negative moment’ in popular art. 49 In a letter to Benjamin, Adorno remarked that high art as well as industrially produced consumer art ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain the elements of change… Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.’ 50
Adorno’s almost direct response to Benjamin appeared in ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (1938), where he analysed the effects of technological innovation on the work of art in the context of music. The central arguments of Adorno’s culture industry theory, which he would develop together with Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, already appear in this article. According to Adorno, as the music acquires the character of a commodity, the new modes of music creation and distribution lead to ‘regression of listening’, and the resulting ‘liquidation of the individual’.
Adorno argues in this essay that the music industry produces and disseminates standardized products. Individual listeners have no more freedom of choice or responsibility over the kind and the quality of music they receive. As they listen to hit songs over and over, they become no longer capable of demanding beyond the limits of what is being supplied. This process affects the individuals most profoundly at the level of cognition, where the capacity for conscious perception is impaired. As the listeners are deprived of the attention and knowledge required to engage in concentrated listening in this ‘infantile milieu’, the music is consumed in a perpetual state of distraction. 51 This is the crux of Adorno’s argument against Benjamin when he asserts that even ‘if the film as a whole seems to be apprehended in a distracted manner, deconcentrated listening makes the perception of the whole impossible’. 52 Under the conditions of modern technology, the very existence of the subject, who can genuinely experience art in an emancipatory fashion, is threatened. According to Adorno, ‘the positive aspect for which the new mass music and regressive listening are praised’ is nothing but an illusion. 53 The new forms of technology do not genuinely allow for the overcoming of alienation and foster mass-mobilization. On the contrary, they undermine the cognitive capacities of the very revolutionary subject.
A decade later, Adorno returned to this theme in ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (in Dialectic of Enlightenment) launching a full-blown attack on film and its role in the entertainment industry. This time the fully developed criticism has two prongs. The first concerns the change in nature of art, its acquiring a commodity character. The other is the change in nature of the subject who experiences that art – from connoisseur to consumer.
Adorno starts with the observation that production for market reduces objects to sameness. This general market principle holds for the culture industry as well. Hit songs, soap operas, TV shows resemble one another not only in form, but also in content. 54 The plot, characters, venues become ready-made clichés such that ‘[i]n a film, the outcome can invariably be predicted at the start – who will be rewarded, punished, forgotten’. 55
The upshot of this development is the elimination of the emancipatory potential in the detail, which for Adorno (as well as for Benjamin) is the source of resistance to the authority, to the sense of inevitability imposed on the subject. Adorno points to the demise of the detail:
By emancipating itself, the detail had become refractory; from Romanticism to Expressionism it had rebelled as unbridled expression, as the agent of opposition, against organization. In music, the individual harmonic effect had obliterated awareness of the form as a whole; in painting the particular detail had obscured the overall composition; in the novel psychological penetration had blurred the architecture. Through totality, the culture industry is putting an end to all that. 56
In contrast to Benjamin, Adorno argues therefore that instead of increased opportunities for exploring the hidden potential in the everyday objects, film renders every detail familiar, hence precluding the possibility for a Messianic cessation of time, through which the past can be redeemed.
This change in the nature of art brought about by the innovation in techniques of mechanical reproduction is matched with an equally powerful alteration in the nature of subject itself. Contra Benjamin, Adorno argues that the consumer culture today is characterized by the decline of individual imagination, spontaneity and creativity. 57 The cultural products of the modern industrial society, ‘especially the most characteristic, sound film, cripple those faculties through their objective makeup’. 58 With this claim, he attacks the shock effect that Benjamin observed to exist in the process of reception of film by the masses:
[The products] are so constructed that their adequate comprehension requires a quick, observant, knowledgeable cast of mind but positively debars the spectator from thinking, if he is not to miss the fleeting facts. This kind of alertness is so ingrained that it does not even need to be activated in particular cases, while still repressing the powers of imagination. … The required qualities of attention have become so familiar from other film and other culture products already known to him or her that they appear automatically. … The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction. 59
Contrary to Benjamin’s expectation, film fails to produce a shock effect on the viewer. Instead, it submits the consciousness to the progression of the plot on the screen. Benjamin was charging the autonomous art with creating a contemplation effect, which allowed the spectator to abandon herself or himself to her or his associations. Compared with the autonomous art, the sin of film is even greater. There is no room for reflection, or for any association or effect that is not intended by the culture industry. The mind of the consumer is totally administered, ‘the power of industrial society is imprinted in people once and for all’. 60 There is no mediation, which is still – at least partly – retained in autonomous art: ‘The only aesthetic principle imperative to film … is that of effect, the elaborate calculation of the spectator’s response down to the last nuance.’ 61
What, then, is Adorno’s response to the challenge presented to the work of art by the technological innovation? Adorno believes it is possible to transcend current reality –the destruction of reason by the power of capital and culture industry – through the work of art. However, unlike Benjamin he does not believe that improvements in technological reproduction would bring about art’s disenchantment. Instead, emancipation requires artists to defy bourgeois art forms. The artist must actively struggle with the tradition to create a discrepancy between his or her artistic medium and the expectations of the bourgeois milieu to discover an authentic source for his or her identity and artwork. 62
A turning point?
In 1966, an article by Adorno entitled ‘Transparencies on Film’ appeared in Die Zeit. With an intervention on the part of independent West German cinema, in this small but significant text Adorno revised his position on film on two important respects: the possibility of an aesthetics proper to film, and its reception.
In this article, Adorno recognizes that there is an inherent difficulty of representing subjective experience in film due to the nature of the photographic process. The success of certain examples, however, in overcoming this difficulty drives Adorno to suggest the following filmic technique: 63
A person who, after a year in the city, spends a few weeks in the mountains abstaining from all work, may unexpectedly experience colorful images of landscapes consolingly coming over him or her in dreams or daydreams. These images do not merge into one another in a continuous flow, but are rather set off against each other in the course of their appearance, much like the magic lantern slides of our childhood. It is in the discontinuity of their movement that the images of the interior monologue resemble the phenomenon of writing: the latter similarly moving before our eyes while fixed in its discrete signs. Such movement of interior images may be to film what the visible world is to painting or the acoustic world to music. As the objectifying recreation of this type of experience, film may become art. 64
Adorno thereby grants the possibility of an aesthetics proper to film. As long as film uses techniques that provide opportunities for adequately communicating the subjective experience, such as montage and integration of other media like certain kinds of music, it carries the potential for becoming authentic artwork.
Another significant modification comes with respect to the viewers. Some scholars argue that Adorno’s previous remarks on the total manipulation and delusion by the culture industry were tainted by elitism. According to Hansen, for example, Adorno’s criticism contained contempt for those who let their needs be manipulated by the culture industry. 65 This new essay is a welcome revision in this respect as Adorno pays more nuanced attention to the discrepancy between the intentions of the film and its actual effect. Because of this gap, Adorno allows the possibility that the ideology of the culture industry can turn against itself. Adorno illustrates his point with the following example: ‘If today you can see in Germany, in Prague, even in conservative Switzerland and in Catholic Rome, everywhere, boys and girls crossing the street locked in each other’s arms and kissing each other unembarrassed, then they have learned this, and probably more, from the films which peddle Parisian libertinage as folklore.’ 66 Adorno surprisingly hails this development as nothing short of definite proof that the culture industry’s attempt at total control fails to materialize: ‘The ideology of the culture industry contains the antidote to its own lie.’ 67
The sum total of these reflections is, in comparison with Adorno’s earlier remarks, surprisingly radical. Adorno not only acknowledges the prospect of liberated forms of perception on the part of spectators, he also grants the possibility of film as a work of art in the service of emancipation. What is the meaning of this turnabout for Adorno’s critical theory of mass culture? How does it figure in terms of the debate between Adorno and Benjamin?
For European intellectuals the bourgeois cultural values proved bankrupt during the First World War. The necessity of adequately addressing the social and political reality of the masses was acute. Benjamin’s appeal to new art forms facilitated by technological development must be interpreted in this context. As I argued in the first part of this article, Benjamin incisively analysed the course of historical progress and its inseparability from technological development. He was positively convinced of the necessity to mobilize new forms of media in the service of emancipation. It is for this reason that in his treatment of the mechanical reproducibility of art, Benjamin identified new forms of art – and film in particular – as an agent of revolution. He argued that film transforms the reactionary attitude of the masses into what he calls ‘progressive reaction’. This link, however, remains under-theorized in Benjamin’s work; it is ‘more a wish than a reality’. 68 Benjamin elaborates neither the conditions under which the shock effect can become politicized nor the type of effect necessary to initiate politically relevant social action. Above all, Benjamin does not address how the individual experiences of the audience can be mobilized into collective action. The link, in sum, between theory and praxis remains seriously severed, and Benjamin offers no direction for bridging this gap.
Given how the urban masses gathered in movie theaters were not the proletariat, but rather ‘the blind, instinctual, insensible, self-destructive’ masses, Adorno’s skepticism is prudent. 69 His analysis compels the reader to approach the concept of film as an artwork with a healthy dose of caution. Adorno warns us that under the circumstances of the culture industry, film can become a manipulation tool, an instrument of totally administered society.
Hansen suggests that ‘Transparencies on Film’ represents a turnabout in Adorno’s thought. I disagree. Despite the seemingly radical transformation in Adorno’s position vis-à-vis film in his 1966 essay, the underlying arguments remain the same. It is clear that Adorno now acknowledges film as an artistic medium, but the philosophical underpinnings that inform his position have not changed. Against Benjamin’s belief in the inherent logic of the technological development, for Adorno the emancipation inheres in the subject, even though this subject is diminished and hollowed under the conditions of mass culture. Yet, in order for the work of art to be enlisted in the service of emancipation, a consciousness-raising effort is required on the part of the individuals – the artist, the composer and the filmmaker. This effect cannot be entrusted to the progress of technology alone.
Adorno promotes this view in ‘On the Fetish Character’ as well as in ‘The Transparencies on Film’. He ends the former with a confirmation of individuality: ‘In music, too, collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of the collectivity.’ 70 In the latter essay Adorno recognizes collectivity as film’s inherent characteristic. But the consumer-oriented art is the norm and the culture industry is ready to jump on every available technological development in order to bring it into the service of total administration. The collective character of film only exacerbates its ideological misuse. Hence, ‘[t]he liberated film would have to wrest its a priori collectivity from the mechanisms of unconscious and irrational influence and enlist this collectivity in the service of emancipatory intentions’. 71 Film, just like any other autonomous art form, lends itself to the purposes of emancipation but it needs to be composed and directed as art, and not just cultural entertainment.
Conclusions
More than 70 years have passed since Benjamin’s reflections on cinema appeared for the first time in ‘The Work of Art’ essay. The new developments both in production and in distribution of art (and especially film) have taken place that would be most likely unimaginable to either Benjamin or Adorno. The special effects and other film techniques have permitted production of movies that would have been impossible to shoot less than 15 years ago. Through the internet, the distribution of films and other media has accelerated at an unprecedented speed. DVDs and home entertainment equipment changed the venue and pattern of film reception.
How is film as a work of art to be evaluated under these modern conditions? Even though Adorno’s and Benjamin’s analysis falls short of providing an answer, it equips the critique of modern culture and society with the necessary questions. How do the technological innovations in the production of the movie affect its aesthetic character? Do they extend the possibility of capturing the moment of redemption in the details of everyday life or completely negate it? How does the at-home, solitary consumption of a film affect its reception? And most importantly for Adorno, how do these developments transform the category of the subject? Is it ever more disempowered or diminished?
I believe Adorno’s prudent skepticism is still relevant in exploring these questions. Despite Benjamin’s enthusiasm, the mechanical reproduction did not produce the redemptive possibilities Benjamin envisioned. Film, more than ever, seems to be in the service of the culture industry.
The most important contribution of these Frankfurt School theorists, however, is their insistence on the relevance of culture. Adorno and Benjamin encourage us to explore such questions. As long as politics and culture are intertwined, their insights remain relevant to understand our contemporary societies.