Periodizing Marcuse

Reassessing the 1960s in Herbert Marcuse's An Essay on Liberation

An exemplary implementation of his maxim “Always historicize!” Frederic Jameson's 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s” is an insightful retrospective of that contentious era marked most significantly by the emergence of the New Left. Refusing to see that decade solely in terms of either an aesthetic, political, or philosophical dialog, Jameson effectively demonstrates the convergence of these apparently disparate discursive realms according to a revised Marxist analysis of that period's nascent economic situation. These narratives thus become legible not merely as “superstructure” in light of a given “base,” but they also come to “verify” one another as complementary strands within this greater common narrative. It is in this manner that the following presentation will seek to reinterpret Herbert Marcuse's 1969 work An Essay on Liberation and also extend Jameson's analysis from his French and American auspices into the West German condition. A manifesto which itself envisions its own convergence of aesthetics and politics, this essay plays upon issues particular to the West German situation while at the same time fitting them into the wider historical context via Jamesonian examination. In particular, the vision of an autonomous imagination found in Marcuse's essay inadvertently expresses the problematic transition to late or neocolonial capitalism at play in the 1960s.

From a biographical perspective, Marcuse and this essay in particular provide a unique vantage point onto the historical epoch of the 1960s, especially within the West German Federal Republic (FRG). Marcuse himself was closely allied with the nascent New Leftist movement throughout the Western world, gaining him the notoriety as one of the most influential theoreticians of the movement and the title “Father of the New Left.” Among the student movements of the FRG he was considered to be undoubtedly the most esteemed of intellectual figures, due largely to his ability to reinterpret other figures like Freud and Adorno into being more amenable to libertine interests.¹ Likewise, he prided himself on his own personal and extremely sympathetic engagement with the student movements, for whom he would often give speeches and discussions.² Marcuse was thus not only highly influential with German New Leftists like Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, but also highly available and more responsive to their concerns. Indeed, Marcuse not only dedicates the essay under examination to these “young militants” but also acknowledges the reciprocal influence upon it that his contact with them has produced.³

The specific importance of An Essay on Liberation subsequently comes about through its own privileged position within the time line of the 1960s. Although Marcuse admits that it is at points a rehashing of his previous major post-Second-World-War works Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), and his essay Repressive Tolerance (1965), this particular essay shows a version of Marcuse's thought which has now been in some sense tested by the New Left between 1965 and 1968, when he finished writing the work. He notes this in his preface, in which he seems to be drawing back from the specific implementations practiced by these radical groups and other revolutionary movements, claiming instead that they instead demonstrate the potential for the realization of his theory: “None of these forces is the alternative,” he claims, “However, they outline, in very different dimensions, the limits of the established societies, of their power of containment,” and herewith the boundaries over which his much-desired liberation takes place.⁴ His Liberation essay thus presents itself as both a manifesto on what true liberation looks like and an assessment of the possibility of such a ideal state latent in the present situation marked by the tension between the Establishment and a resistance of diametric opposition. While his previous major works may have been at least nominally interested in praxis, this essay nevertheless dedicates itself to the examination and realization thereof as its primary impetus, and as such stands as a key witness of the latent powers at play in that period.

However, in order to discover the implicit possibility of that period as it is drawn up in Marcuse's essay, a new conception of history as an all-encompassing sphere of action must supplant the literal understanding of Marcuse's vocabulary of separatist hegemony and opposition. Following Jameson's method as set out in his own essay on the 1960s, the process of periodizing dictates that we must not examine that decade with an eye to celebrating or condemning it, but rather we must reconstrue it as historical space which allowed for and made possible a certain range of theoretical, aesthetic, and political activity. Yet in doing so, Jameson has us widen the conception of historical period away from a narrowly construed understanding of a dominant or hegemonic sphere inside of which activity is confined to a single homogeneous form or style and outside of which the historically exemplary or opposing stands apart; rather he claims that “historical period” is to be understood as “the sharing of a common objective situation, to which a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations is then possible, but always within that situation's structural limitations.”⁵ In contrast to Marcuse's own rhetoric of opposition and hegemony, the Jameson approach eschews with the idea that there is a monolithic Establishment which sets the agenda of a period, against which a historically heretofore disenfranchised counterculture must fight against. The process of writing a history of that decade via Marcuse is not to be found in contrasting his conception of the Establishment and the potential for a new liberated realm apart form this world, but rather in how these two are homologous expressions of their objective determining situation.⁶ More specifically, Jameson's analysis concerns itself with how these seemingly disparate facets express the changes taking place in that determining situation; historical inquiry therefore deals with “the rhythm and dynamics of the fundamental situation in which those very different levels develop according to their own internal laws.”⁷ To understand the Liberation essay as a periodized text mandates a reading of it that sees a certain turn in its understanding of aesthetic liberation in correspondence with a turn with a significant change in the “base” of that period.

More specifically, the aesthetic theory forwarded in Marcuse's Liberation essay will demonstrate a corresponding shift vis-a-vis the transformation of the “classical” capitalism into its “late” and now present form, a process particular that is the fundamental dynamic at play in the decade. According to Jameson, the 1960s were typified by an expansion of capitalism into arenas heretofore not seen before, a process exhibited around the world by the concomitant tendencies of decolonization and neocolonization. In terms of decolonization, the expansion of capitalism coincided with a withdrawal of existing forms of economic and political subjugation whereby newly disclosed forms of “liberated” subjectivity came into being that created a space for novel forms of solidarity and agency. Following its namesake literal meaning, decolonization came about in the third world through the removal of first world colonial rule, whereby third world peoples were no longer identifiable as “natives” but rather as a new class of historical agents; likewise, it found a place among first world minorities via civil rights movements and the discovery of a cultural and racial nationalism. In its more abstract sense, decolonization also took place among non-minority first world populations as a general disinheritance of existing authoritative institutions, like, in the West German example, the state and the university.⁸ Much of the nascent generation of West Germans born after the Second World War and coming of age in the 1960s saw the existing establishments of political activity and interaction with the state and social institutions were seen as complicit with authoritarianism, and thus necessitating the creation of a new sphere of “extra-parliamentary” action and solidarity.⁹

On the other hand, however, this process of decolonization dialectically coincides with a process of neocolonization, whereby these new spaces of identification and agency became subject to the self-referential logic of capital itself. With the withdrawal of colonizing powers in the first and third world, there came about an integration of these newly found liberated spaces into a wider system of economic and technological utilization. Among the third world population and minorities in the first world, who had heretofore stood outside the capitalist system, the creation of new identities was followed by their co-option into the greater economic system. For example, the so-called “Green Revolution” in the post-colonial third world at once provided new material possibilities for third world peoples through the mechanization of agriculture, while at the same time it destroyed local identities and practices and replaced them with those of technocratic capitalism.¹⁰ This sort of “re-colonization” typified and still typifies the emergence of this new version of capitalism in both the first world and the third, whereby this new space for political consciousness in the former is eaten up like the latter:

[L]ate capitalism in general (and the 60s in particular) constitute a process in which the last surviving internal and external zones of precapitalism—the last vestiges of noncommodified or traditional space within and outside the advanced world—are now ultimately penetrated and colonized in their turn.¹¹

New consciousness of identification and action in the first world therefore becomes denuded into a logic that mimics commodification, that is, it becomes a self-referential continuum of signification that nevertheless recreates real or material referents. As Jochen Hörisch puts it, commodification is a relation of s(t)imulation with the real: On the one hand, money simulates reality through its numerical replication of it, while on the other hand it stimulates reality, recreating it after its own image.¹² In this sense, Jameson notes the 60s to be a point in which this process of s(t)imulation reached a particular high point, a period which was “an immense and inflationary issuing of superstructural credit; a universal abandonment of the referential gold standard; an extraordinary printing up of ever more devalued signifiers,” insofar as this newly discovered superstructural sphere of action became drawn into the ever-increasing simulacrum of capital.¹³ Expressed conversely, neocolonization represents an “explosion” of culture into both superstructural realms and base infrastructure; unlike a completely sealed-off domain for free action and thought, culture became synonymous all aspects of life in general.¹⁴

In Marcuse's Liberation essay, these twin processes of liberating decolonization and co-opting neocolonization manifest themselves as his conception of imagination and utopistic aesthetics, which together stand as the domain of autonomous negativity but also subsume themselves back into the referentiality of capital. Decolonization occurs via the realization of the imagination, which through its moral and aesthetic reappropriation of representation creates in itself the vestige of an oppositional autonomy. For Marcuse, the establishment of an autonomous sphere of consciousness and activity depends upon a problematization of language, whereby the latter discloses itself as morally contentious structure. Against classical conceptions of language as an objective medium through which truths (or falsities) are expressed, Marcuse notes that words have a certain strategic value, they form a “verbal arsenal” which perpetuates and originates from a certain ideology or latent morality. To create some vestige of autonomy therefore entails a corresponding severing of language from existing ideological usages, or rather, a “transfer of moral standards (and of their validation) from the Establishment to the revolt against it.”¹⁵ Such “linguistic therapy” is not simply a rewriting of a word's definition or a stripping of its ideological connotations, but rather a re-moralization of the word, a re-affirmation of its necessary role in ideology and an imperative to make us of it as such. Language thus stands as a front line in the struggle for the decolonization of subjectivity, a fact that will come full circle with the negative work of art.

However, to even begin this linguistic therapy, Marcuse must first partially undermine the robustness of subjectivity by reassessing it according to a de-personalized sense of intersubjectivity. While he does not go as far as the French structuralists, who dissolve subjectivity into more or less just an effect of some sort of grand structure, Marcuse nevertheless makes use of an underlying structure of “biology” that covertly sets the boundaries of real agency. The re-moralization of words is a fundamental transformation of not merely language and the morality that upholds existing ideological meanings, but also the pre-cognitive instinctual basis of these sensibilities. To get beyond the existing forms of usage requires a transcendence of not only existing moral signification, but of the heretofore given set of tacit instincts and libidinal controls that covertly determine one's moral precepts, one's basic understanding of right and wrong, of shame and pride, etc. Despite appearing as an immutable “biological” disposition of human behavior, this basis is nevertheless historical and socially predicated and thus imbricated with the status quo; to challenge one's instincts is a “political rebellion” that initiates a new set of subjective possibilities.¹⁶ To make possible a new form of decolonized autonomous subjectivity thus mandates the latter's desublimation such that it no longer appears in terms of a dualistic politics, of oppressed versus oppressor, but rather as a transindividual “third term” that mediates disparate subjects.¹⁷

Subsequently, the creation of a new form of “liberated” subjectivity comes about through the transformation of the subject's fundamental basis into the imagination, which is informed by a new aesthetic sensibility or ethos. No longer dominated by existing basic instinctual sensibilities, the subject gains a “utopistic” moral and aesthetic perception that subsumes technological and scientific reason with sensuous experience, the practical with the fanciful, and as such becomes guided by the imagination, which mediates between these two faculties.¹⁸ Passing into the unconscious “biological” realm of the subject, this subsumption establishes the newly uncovered aesthetic imagination as an autonomous space of creative thought and action, a Lebenswelt in which free collective action becomes possible.¹⁹ More specifically, aesthetic sensibility gains autonomy through its negative aspect to existing society:

[Aesthetic ethos] emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life: negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture; affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself.²⁰

The aesthetic ethos thus serves as what might be called a structural negation of existing society, for in creating a completely new framework in which subjectivity and morality emerge radically and incommensurately different from the given status quo, the aesthetic ethos stands as critique of the Establishment in its most fundamental construction. By merely existing, by simply realizing a self-commensurate order, the aesthetic ethos demonstrates its fundamental autonomy insofar as it is a complete counterexample to status quo.

Coming full circle here, however, the oppositional autonomy of the aesthetic ethos recreates linguistic therapy as a critique of representation itself. Given a radically new sense of morality and ideology qua the imagination, language must follow suit and transform itself qualitatively such that breaks with the existing form of society and express this new found sensibility. In this sense, language inherits the radical formal opposition to the status quo whereby it violently reappropriates itself from existing usages, best exemplified by the methods used by the radical movements, who would often desublimate and devalue established vocabulary by reversing or severely altering the meaning of esteemed words.²¹ Yet in so doing, Marcuse tacitly exposes a critique of language as a medium of representation. As noted earlier, language is no longer seen here as a means of revealing truth, but rather gains a political role as a means of establishing or tearing down ideology. In becoming autonomous through its negation of the real, aesthetic ethos cuts away language's necessary correspondence to that real; no longer must the sign refer back to an actual existent, but it is instead subsumed in what amounts to a pure interplay with other signs. As Frederic Jameson puts it, language no longer functions as “the discovery of truth and the repudiation of error, but rather as a struggle about purely linguistic formulations, as the attempt to formulate verbal propositions (material language) in such a way that they are unable to imply unwanted or ideological consequences.”²² Marcuse's much sought after linguistic therapy thus reveals the first hints of the process of neocolonization insofar as it now sets language apart into what will eventually turn into a self-referential signifying system.

From these seemingly inauspicious beginnings, one comes to see precisely how this process of neocolonization takes place at a tacit level within Marcuse's essay, especially when one expands upon the modes of signification within this new separate sphere of the imagination. Above all, this is displayed in the accompanying transformation of the sign qua the work of art, which subverts itself to the process of neocolonization via Marcuse's commitment to Form. As noted above, the negative autonomy of the aesthetic ethos depends on its Form with a capital “F,” a feature which sets it against the fundamental of the existing real. Art, the material objectification of this new sensibility, thus gains a new function vis-a-vis existing society: Like the general category of language, its “value” transforms itself from an affirmation of existing ideological content to a radical refusal of all affirmation, an achievement which is affected through its ability to be a separate reality through its own Form. Yet in doing so, art (and of course aesthetic ethos) oddly comes to mimic, or rather, reconstitute that reality which it seeks to negate. Far from revisiting realist conceptions of representation forfeited with the general negativity of language, Marcuse nevertheless sees art as a means by which the real is to be “discovered and projected.”²³ Indeed, it is through its inherent and self-sufficient structure that art becomes in a certain sense capable of replicating reality:

It is precisely the Form by virtue of which art transcends the given reality, works in the established reality against the established reality; and this transcendent element is inherent in art, in the artistic dimension. Art alters experience by reconstructing the objects of experience—reconstructing them in word, tone, image.²⁴

Ironically, it is this negative feature of art that gives it an eerie resemblance to the existence it negates; Marcuse enacts what amounts to be a seemingly accidental mimesis of this “Establishment” system from which he seeks autonomy. Nevertheless, this event is anything but coincidental, for as Jameson points out, “The very unconscious replication of the 'real' totality of the world system in the mind is then what allows culture to separate itself as a closed and self-sufficient 'system' in its own right: reduplication, and at the same time, floating above the real.”²⁵ We are thus subjected to yet another paradox, for in order to be completely divorced from existing culture and its fallen modes of acquiescent representation, the sign qua art must maintain reality as a secret referent behind the apparent free play of its signified and signifier. Its negative autonomy is in truth a “semi-autonomy” that calls forth the external world at precisely the same moment that it negates it.

Subsequently, Marcuse's process of establishing a “decolonized” sense of subjectivity results in a concomitant “neocolonization” in the sense that it both co-opts this new sphere of autonomy as well as it enacts a radical expansion of culture. In effectuating its break to reality by being “semi-autonomous,” the new space of autonomy found in the imagination is nevertheless “recolonized” by the insidious logic of s(t)imulation, whereby it at once “transcends” the world by mimicking it, but in that very maneuver becomes recreated in the image of that reality in the sense that it takes upon itself a Form (which although antagonistic to existing societal forms nevertheless extends the existence of structured reality). Moreover, the supposition of antagonistic form against existing culture and works of art amounts to a methodological desublimation of culture in general, in which qualitative distinctions between high and low forms become liquidated.²⁶ In so doing, all forms of life subsume themselves into one vast (and thus “inflated,” following the rhetoric of commodification) monolithic sense of “culture,” which shows a further re-integration of the autonomous sphere of “oppositional art” insofar as the latter reintroduces itself into the culture of existing society.

In the end, Marcuse's essay demonstrates that the 1960s were neither a period of unqualified liberation nor a period of abject failure; rather, his work demonstrates the problematic dialectical forces at play during that period marked by the transition to a system of global capitalism. A theoretical leader to the worldwide and West German New Left movement, Marcuse provides his Essay on Liberation as an exemplary expression of the implications of praxis within that decade. To realize it as such, a conception of history informed of the dialectical connection between hegemony and opposition is required, which discloses discourses of that era in terms of their parallel homogeneities to the underlying economic dynamics of the time, noted by the shift to late capitalism and the concomitant processes of decolonization and neocolonization. Marcuse's essay realizes decolonization through its development of the imagination, which stands in autonomous opposition to existing society, while it also enacts neocolonization through the implicit replication of existing society through its reliance on form. Subsequently, this results in both the co-option of the autonomous imagination by capitalistic logic and also a desublimating integration of all forms of life into “culture.”

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor, and Herbert Marcuse. “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review, no. 233 (January/February 1999), pp. 123-136.

Dirke, Sabine von. All Power to the Imagination: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Hörisch, Jochen. Kopf oder Zahl: Die Poesie des Geldes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998.

Jameson, Frederic. “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60's without Apology (Spring – Summer, 1984), pp. 178-209.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Becon Press, 1974.

Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Marcuse, Herbert. Repressive Tolerance: A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

Thomas, Nick. Protest Movments in the 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy. New York: Berg, 2003.

1Sabine von Dirke points out quite aptly how Marcuse how exceeded the influences of his fellow theorists Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich through the potential for political and aesthetic liberation he envisioned in previous theories. For instance, his reinterpretation of Freud in Eros and Civilization provided a means by which New Leftist theorists appropriated Freud's theory as a liberating aesthetic praxis, and eventually making Marcuse's understanding of Freud more prominent that Reich's. Likewise, Marcuse's adoption and revision of Benjamin's belief in the transgressive potential of “low” art forms gave a certain appeal among New Left theorists who held Adorno's stance against the culture industry to be too elitist. Cf. Sabine von Dirke. All Power to the Imagination: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 38-42, 49-55.

2Compare this with Adorno and Habermas, who saw the student movements in varying degrees of incredulous contempt, the latter calling it a form of “left fascism.” Marcuse openly engaged groups like the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), at one point even refusing to give a talk at Adorno's institute in Frankfurt am Main if not allowed to talk to these activist students. Cf. Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review, no. 233 (January/February 1999), pp. 123-136. For Habermas' reported comment, see p. 129.

3Herbert Marcuse. An Essay on Liberation. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. ix-x.

4Ibid, p. viii.

5Frederic Jameson. “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60's without Apology (Spring – Summer, 1984), p. 178.

6Compare this with the argument forwarded by von Dirke, who founds her analysis on the aesthetics of the New Left completely on its existence as a “counterculture” in opposition to a hegemonic “dominant culture.” Cf. Dirke, p. 1-4.

7Jameson, p. 179.

8Ibid, pp. 181-182.

9This comes about from a variety of directions. Firstly, with the banning of extreme left wing parties, the 1959 Bade Godesberg “realignment” of the SPD, and the wholesale identification of the working class with the “rising water” of the post-war Wirtschaftswunder, traditional forms of “old leftist” identification and political action were on the whole bankrupted or acquiescent the conservative politics of the CDU. Secondly, these institutions themselves appeared as being, on the whole, at least tacit continuations of an authoritarian form of government, as evidenced by the continued occupation important governmental and academic positions by former NSDAP party members, the Federal Government's adoption of the Emergency Laws (Notstandgesetze) which could allow the Hitler-esque suspension of civil law, the persistence of an arcane university system, and government complicity in American efforts in Vietnam. The subsequent student protest movements of the 1960s dealt specifically with all of these latter conditions. Cf. Nick Thomas. Protest Movments in the 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy. (New York: Berg, 2003).

10Jameson, pp. 184-185.

11Ibid, p. 207.

12Jochen Hörisch. Kopf oder Zahl: Die Poesie des Geldes. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 67.

13Jameson, p. 208.

14Ibid, p. 201.

15Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 8.

16Ibid, p. 9.

17While Jameson shows in his reading of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason how this work anticipates the structuralist extrapolation of neocolonization, it seems premature to make quite the same claim with Marcuse, who ironically makes use of this de-subjectification of the subject to reassert the autonomy of the subject. Marcuse clearly has a more optimistic understanding of the subject than, say, his Frankfurt School successor, who, as Jameson quite rightly points out, seems to bring about the parallel shift from a “pre-structuralist” Marcusean perspective to his own quasi-structuralist interest in language, within which subjectivity does not seem to play a robust role. Cf. Jameson, pp. 186-187.

18Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 26-29.

19Ibid, p. 30-31.

20Ibid, p. 25.

21Ibid, p. 34-36.

22Jameson, p. 194.

23Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 39.

24Ibid, p. 40.

25Jameson, p. 199.

26Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, pp. 46-47.

The Pregnant Moment of Art

Walter Benjamin and the Intersection of Technical Reproduction and Historical Consciousness

Ever since appearing in G. W. F. Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics as “a thing of the past,”¹ art has been an object meriting not just aesthetic but also historicizing analysis. This fact is made nowhere more succinctly than in Walter Benjamin's essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Making its debut in the turbulent year of 1935 during an era laden with an undeniable historical tension, this work displays an apprehension of the artwork as not only an object of aesthetic contemplation, but also as a juncture of political and historical concern; rather than expressing transcendent eternal truths, art becomes the site of the decidedly contemporaneous and contentious, engaging in a struggle that deals with National Socialism as much as (if not more than) timeless beauty. In particular, this mutual concern with the historical and political crystallizes through the special vantage point an of moment implicit within the artwork, whereby it constitutes itself into a configuration capable of jarringly effectuating the historical present. From this perspective, one sees in Benjamin's conception of the work of art a disjunctive rather than reestablishing function within the existing course of history. This paper will therefore show how Benjamin has a certain “temporal politics” which constructs the critical moment of history out of an understanding of the artwork as a pregnant complex juxtaposed against a present of immanent tension.²

I. The Temporal Horizon of Technical Reproduction

For Benjamin as well as many of his contemporaries (not the least of which Martin Heidegger) the year 1935 undoubtedly presented itself as one of immanent tension within not only politics but also the arts. In German cinema, for instance, that year marked the release of the “masterpiece” propaganda film Triumph des Willens by Leni Riefenstahl, signaling the complete transition from the cinema of the “Golden Silent Age” of the 1920s and early 1930s to the intensely more spectacular post-1933 cinema of the propagandistic sound film. This double transition of politicization and technological development within the medium which culminated in this year reveals not only the extent to which politics and technology intertwined themselves within an era that sought the total mobilization of a Volk, but also the stake that art had in respect to these two elements. Indeed, if technology and art had not already been subject to a historical-political critique before fascism, National Socialism certainly achieved this through what amounts to be the “aestheticization of politics,” as Benjamin calls it,³ whereby, following Goebbels, “Politics is the plastic art of the State,” i.e. the expansion of technologization in accord with a political objective becomes in itself “beautiful.”⁴ It should be of no surprise that politics, technology, and art become something of a holy trinity for Benjamin (and Heidegger), each element of which having definite relations to each other while forming altogether what amounts to be a rather amorphous collective entity. As such, developments such as the advent of sound films and other methods of artistic production and reproduction provide the event horizon of not just radical transformations in aesthetics, but also for politics in historical context. For Benjamin, the prevailing present of the work of art, typified by the increasing technologization of its production, stands as testament to a contentious political and technological situation within history, thus providing the setting for the artwork's act of incursion into history.⁵

The immanent foreground of art for Benjamin presents itself in terms of the changing means by which art was produced, which Benjamin gives extensive treatment in his “Work of Art” essay. With the appearance of technologies that allowed the non-manual rapid reproduction and extensive distribution of works, art undertook what was a gradual qualitative change from a “cult” to “exhibition” form. Heretofore, the basis of art was located in its ritualistic usage within a tradition; it was considered endowed with aesthetic value only insofar as it performed a necessary function within magical or religious practices, or, in later times, within the secularized albeit quasi-theological cult of beauty. In this sense, art had a “parasitical dependence” upon ritual, from which it could liberate itself only through the advent of technological reproduction.⁶ By making the work of art reproducible through mechanical rather than manual processes, nascent technology subsequently allowed the work of art to become more independent of its original and also more accessible in the sense that copies of it put in settings that “meet the beholder halfway,” e.g. in one's own home.⁷ In so doing, this allowed the work of art to become valued according to its ability to be a spectacle, i.e. its exhibition value came to exceed its ritual value to the point that there was a qualitative transformation that made the latter negligible.⁸

The effect of this transformation of how art is produced and valued subsequently altered the very being of the work in radical ways. For Benjamin, the supplanting of ritual value makes a whole range of concepts obsolescent, not the least of which being that of the authenticity and aura of the work. Authenticity and aura played a special role in respect to the work as an object of ritual value. Authenticity was the basis of uniqueness for the work of art, i.e. its credential of being an original instance within time and space, or rather, its presence in terms of a individual narrative or history: “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,” Benjamin claims.⁹ Aura is moreover the accrual of this unique presence upon the original, and as such, it is that which “whithers” with the devaluation of the artwork as ritual within tradition. Through the proliferation of an indefinite number of reproductions via technological means the original no longer is truly unique, no longer has the right for its particular story to be considered canonical among so many copies; its particular authenticity is undermined and as such does not any longer accrue that countenance of aura.¹⁰ Likewise, the reproduction diminishes the aura by recreating the work as reconstitutable, i.e. capable of meeting the beholder halfway, in her own setting, rather than in the unique setting of the work itself.¹¹ The qualitative change in the valuation of the work of art thus corresponds to its simultaneous impoverishment in authenticity and aura, whereby it also loses existence within the domain tradition to the extent that it no longer has its own history or setting.

For Benjamin, the qualitative transformation of art's terms of valuation and existence would seem to occasion a unique historical and political horizon for the creation of a revolutionary mass basis since it makes possible collective transformations of perception. According to Benjamin, the supplanting of auratic media with post-auratic varieties corresponds to a parallel political subversion. The destitution of aura amounts to a “liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage,” whereby works of art no longer allow themselves to be assessed according to conventional criticism.¹² Instead, the post-auratic work of art mandates a new mode of apperception, as Benjamin notes via the photography of Eugene Atget:

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.¹³

Atget's photography, which instead of standing as testimony to its own function within a ritual of tradition, compels its critic to sever her ties to existent forms of criticism, opting instead to rediscover the photographs according to a heretofore invisible political facet immanent to the work of art itself. In a sense, post-auratic art presents itself, following the words of Frederic Jameson, as “an imperative to grow new organs to expand our sensoria and our bodies to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions,” impossible perhaps within the realm of existing habit.¹⁴ It enables the creation of a new sort of consciousness that stands at odds with convention, a chance to discover the world in a drastically new light. Within the exemplary example of film, for instance, Benjamin points out that conventional free association with the image that informed the apperception of painting is subsequently made impossible before the film's persistent flood of images; it prohibits hard pondering, replacing it instead with an identification of immediate thought with the stream of consciousness represented by the stream of images, in effect replacing individual thought with the simulated experience of the medium. In so doing, film constitutes a shock for the viewer insofar as it challenges her to completely change her relationship to the object, to in a sense develop new eyes with which to see it.¹⁵ In so doing, post-auratic art opens up a wider field of potential action to consciousness that had remained opaque in previous auratic forms. In film, for instance, the use of close-ups and slow motion revealed an “unconscious optics” that now disclose the world as being, in a sense, bigger:

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace 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 of an immense and unexpected field of action...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.¹⁶

Film discloses a greater capacity in the world for subjective action through the magnification of a spatial-temporal heretofore closed in auratic objects. Likewise, the subject appears to expand itself through film, insofar as it becomes cognizant of these new possibilities of activity. In this sense, the changes in apperception mandated by film and other post-auratic forms effectuates what appears to be political subversion: it challenges tradition not only in the criticism of the work of art, but also in the rendering of reality itself. Through the film new consciousness is a form of self-consciousness which redraws the lines of personal action; the power to shock the subject is a call-to-arms which forces it out of acquiesce. In a certain sense, technical reproduction not only occurs with the work of art, but also re-creates the subject. Post-auratic reproduces the subject as a more cognizant and effective agent.

Moreover, due to the ability of post-auratic art to reach an audience heretofore not available to auratic art, this potential subversion effectuates itself on a mass basis and thus could serve as a new form of political class consciousness. With the decay of the aura, Benjamin foresees that the masses have become able to bring the work of art closer both spatially (through the ease of distribution offered by technical reproduction) and humanly (insofar as art no longer must be revered in its authentic authority). Art has thus become a mass phenomenon, capable of effecting changes upon (and being subject to changes from) an entire society through its availability and approachability.¹⁷ Film, for instance, demonstrates this capacity particularly well. In the first place, film is aptly suited for an engagement with the public en masse, insofar as it presents itself in a matter readily available for mass consumption.¹⁸ As such, it also makes itself readily available as an object of criticism for this public or, in other words, the ease of its availability for a wider audience and its lack of pretense allows it to be seen as a challenge for a massive audience, thus “everybody who witnesses [film's] accomplishments is somewhat of an expert.”¹⁹ The shock effect of film, its capacity to incite new forms of consciousness, thus translates necessarily upon the mass level and presents itself as a massive collective experience, a diffusion of critical praxis. Indeed, the alteration of subjectivity appears in inextricable connection with the seemingly plebeian aspect of art. Thus, Benjamin claims that, “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form.”²⁰ In a certain sense, film and other post-auratic forms of art provide the basis of what could be considered a class consciousness, a mode of collective apprehension that serves as a fundamental solidarity among the masses capable of breaking with existing ideology and modes of consciousness.

On the other hand, the fascist example reveals that this mass transformation of collective perception as envisioned by the “Work of Art” essay is nonetheless insufficient as the basis of a new politicized class consciousness. Benjamin's ultimate goal of achieving the politicization of art seems to once and for all be refuted by fascism's exploitation of art. Rather than realizing art as the basis of a wide-reaching politicization of the public, the use of art under National Socialism achieved quite the opposite, rendering the political aesthetic instead of vice versa.²¹ Fascism utilized art as a means of imposing a complete regime upon the public, transforming the society of total mobilization into an organic whole of inordinate beauty.²² As the example of Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens demonstrates, the potentially subversive aspect of film actually works against a critical politic; the film actually utilizes its ability to supplant the viewer's consciousness as a means of integrating individual perception into a political schema, thereby denying the conscious-altering “legitimate claim to being reproduced” offered by post-auratic art.²³ The viewer is not challenged to reassess her perception, but is compelled to identify with the cheering hordes through the synthesized spectacle that holds her attention. The popular aspect thus effectuates this on a societal level, creating not a solidarity among the masses, but an integration of the masses into the state apparatus. The viewer does not necessarily find a cognitive like-mindedness with her fellow-viewers, but rather becomes one of the mob, a drone within the total system envisioned on screen. In effect, technical reproduction supplants its rebellion against the “natural material” of the political status quo with a equally vigorous one against “human material,” a process that likewise abolishes the aura, albeit with drastically different results than what Benjamin imagines.²⁴

The “Work of Art” essay thus falls short in realizing a necessary basis for liberation in post-auratic art. As S. Brent Plate points out, like many commentators on this work, Benjamin's attempt to discover a solvent revolutionary basis in the work of art is “highly idealistic, its political potential greatly overrated.”²⁵ Indeed, Benjamin himself falls short of declaring technical reproduction to be the basis of political revolution, which had heretofore seemed possible by the sheer power that film and other post-auratic art forms had over perception. Instead, this further revolutionary impulse appears to be tempered by external considerations. “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,” he claims.²⁶ Yet, this simple disclaimer seems incredulous in light of the exceedingly formal aspect in technical reproduction. It is not so much the fashion of the work of art which appears first and foremost altered by these new methods of reproduction, but rather the ways in which they are composed and distributed. The real control in the style of objects appears stem more from revolutions in the medium rather than those with the backing capital. It was not William Randolph Hearst that made the daily illustrated newspaper possible and popular, but rather the development of lithography, which seems to have revolutionized newsprint by virtue of the manifest possibilities contained in its own technique, as Benjamin himself points out.²⁷ It is therefore not adequate to merely toss off the entire thesis of the revolutionary work of art so easily, for while its post-auratic form may certainly be easily co-opted by fascism, it nevertheless still contains the possibility of a revolutionary politics. The task before us now lies in disclosing the facet of post-auratic art which makes its co-opting possible, which will thereby provide the horizon for its actual revolutionary spirit.

In particular, the principle feature that belies the post-auratic artwork as political liberation is its implicit commitment to a debilitating temporal realm. Although not overtly theorized within the “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin nevertheless hints here at a certain sense of temporality implicit within technical reproduction, which he later fleshes out in his work “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In the former essay, the highest qualitative achievement of technical reproduction coincides with a radical quantitative change in speed. The feature of lithography that effectuated a qualitative change was neither its capability to display images and text in greater detail nor its ability to produce a larger number of prints, but rather the rapidity with which new prints could be produced, which allowed it to express events more akin to actual experience. “Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing,” Benjamin points out.²⁸ Technical reproduction brings about more significant effects upon the work of art by bringing the later closer to “real time,” i.e. a sort of temporal existence which more closely simulates unmediated experience. Likewise, the shift to photography and then film brought what amounts to the heretofore highest achievement in reproduction for Benjamin insofar as they reach a sort of temporality that appears to meet and even surpass real time:

Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated [with photography] 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...These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valéry 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.'²⁹

Valéry's uncanny prophesy from 1931 anticipates a development in the speed of reproduction that quite openly exceeds that found in the photography and film, which already achieved a throughput on par with the original pace of production. This seemingly Utopian description of the remote control thus brings into sharp contrast the most ideal manifestation of temporality within technical reproduction, namely the moment or instant, a length of time that is infinitesimally short to the point that occurs faster than perception, ergo the German term Augenblick (literally, “the glance of an eye”) or the English expression “in the blink of an eye.” In effect, however, Valéry's radical formulation is already an extrapolation of the moment as it already appears in photography and film. In its ability to reproduce the radically transitory, e.g. “the fleeting expression of a human face,”³⁰ photography already brought about the moment via the rapid-exposure image, which film took to a higher level through the reconstitution of time. Indeed, film presents the viewer with an “unconscious optics” predicated precisely on the dissolution of perception into a whole series of momentary images that can reproduce experience in within a temporal realm of slow- or fast-motion, and thereby exploding out the “prison-world” of consciousness “by the dynamite of the tenth of a second.”³¹ Subsequently, it is this feature of hyperactive temporality in technical reproduction vis-a-vis the moment that makes possible the shock effect of post-auratic art, specifically that of film, insofar as it preempts consciousness, confronting the senses with the persistent flow of stimuli.³²

The imposition of the moment upon consciousness nevertheless has unto itself a latent political dimension which prohibits the realization of historical agency through the work of art as it emerges from the “Work of Art” essay. It is here that Benjamin first points out that the sort of rapt attention mandated by this hyperactive flow of time: To be shocked by the work of art entails that one must receive it in a state of distraction. In a certain sense, the moment pushes aside contemplation in its effort to subvert status quo apperception whereby “[t]he public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”³³ Although it is effective in instigating new consciousness, this consciousness lacks a certain critical focus, or, as Benjamin elaborates in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a historical faculty. The radical thematization of the moment in post-auratic work such as film presents itself as what Benjamin refers to as “homogeneous, empty time.”³⁴ Rather than marked by events of varying significance and duration, just as a calendar notes holidays and the variant months, the time of the moment constructs itself like a clock, which is divided into an ultimately infinite number of uniform moments, à la the second, each of which have no unique value in and of themselves.³⁵ Altogether, this construct creates a continuum of moments, each in a certain sense a transition from the one preceding it to the one following it, and in which the present is precisely merely a persistent movement from one instant to the next. One can see immediately that this is the sort of temporality created by film, which achieves its effect upon the audience only through its imposition of a continuous stream of images; even in those instances where perception-mimicking time is suspended by slow- or fast-motion effects, the film preserves the continuum of this endless stream of images.

Likewise, this construction of time in the post-auratic work of art construes history as a debilitating space for political action. Within its sphere, Benjamin apprehends a general co-opting of genuine conceptions of progress and effective action associated with the ideology of Weimar Social Democracy which, like film, became subjugated to fascist exploitation. Progress, which Social Democracy saw as universal for all humanity, boundlessly perfectible, and irresistibly directed, nevertheless can achieve none of these conceived goals insofar they are tautological reassertions of fallow time of the moment, which can only stipulate progress as its own quantitative passing of moments into the infinite future.³⁶ This recourse to the never to be reached future thus undermines historical consciousness as a phenomenon of collective action insofar as it mandates a forgetfulness of the past, supplanting “the image of enslaved ancestors” for that of “liberated grandchildren” among the working masses, which serves only to subjugate them within the existing apparatus of political domination.³⁷ In sum, Benjamin's portrayal of the angel of history in Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus exemplifies the impossible situation instigated by fallow time: Despite resolutely facing the past in all of its disastrous horror, he cannot bellow his call-to-arms due to the unassailable wind of Social Democratic progress blowing him ceaselessly into a future which he cannot turn around to see.³⁸ He is caught in the wind of empty time, which can allow nothing but the inevitable movement of present into a blind future.

The event horizon offered by the advent of technical reproduction therefore presents the work of art in a contentious position of making critical consciousness possible while rendering inept in execution. The incursion of technology into the production of the work of art presents itself as providing the mass basis of a new class consciousness founded upon the consciousness-shaping effects of the desacrelization of aesthetic judgment. Nevertheless the very aspect of post-auratic art which lends it its power with the masses simultaneously creates a temporal regime which thwarts the realization of historical agency via the perceptual connection to the work of art. While the film may have altered the viewer's apperception of the possible domain of her agency, it nevertheless also restricts the temporal space in which that action may happen by its persistent acquiescence to the indefinite future. The task of a work of art which seeks to make itself politically significant thus mandates the discovery of another form of temporality in itself, by which it can break the continuum of time supposed by technical reproduction.

II. Pregnant Configurations: the Dialectical Image and the Epochal Present

Like the year of its first appearance, Benjamin's conception of the artwork in the “Work of Art” essay shows itself to be in a state of immanent tension. On the one hand, the form of its production provides the basis of a new consciousness; on the other hand, this renders praxis based thereon ineffectual through the fallowness of its projected temporality. In the face of this, the work of art thus presents a certain necessity in itself which, as Andrew Benjamin points out, situates it in a moment of imperative:

Need [in the case of Benjamin] is a demand given by the present—the present being the construal of the contemporary at (and as) the time of writing, again need's time—as such the response to need is itself contemporary. With need, with its instantiation, its having a time at a given instant, a relation to the given is established. In other words if need is a response to what is given—the gift of tradition creating the specificity of the moment—then the response occurs at a particular instant.³⁹

This problem in the work of art is thus not merely just a formal problem that happens to have temporal consequences, but rather it is crisis in the very present (Gegenwart) of the work itself, which places it in a relationship of compliance or rebellion to the status quo. To rectify the demand of the work of art to be a subverting challenge to the perceiver, it must therefore undertake a critique of the present that produces; it must recreate itself in its present in order to be able to break out of the “Social Democratic” time-trap of progress. Thus, following this general approach laid out by Andrew Benjamin, one finds the solution for the failure of the work of art in the latter's ability to respond to its moment at hand, to construe itself in such a way that it discovers in this particular point in time a break with its heretofore acquiescent place in history. For Benjamin, the work of art redeems itself as a monadic image, which breaks apart fallow time by instigating a time of now (Jetztzeit) that reattunates perception to the lost dimension of the past.⁴⁰

While the work of art is not called by name within Benjamin's later “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” it nevertheless makes an extensive number of appearances in the guise of the image, which provides the fundamental inroad into its temporal deficiency. The image plays a leading role within his appropriation of the work of art and its reception. According to Howard Caygill, the Benjamin held the image as a “technology for organizing experience, and that visual art was a way of speculating upon limits of experience from within it,” which gave it an especial position not only within his examination of apperception, but furthermore within the criticism of art in general.⁴¹ This is especially true in the age of the post-auratic work as exemplified by the examples of photography and film. With these two media, the image enjoys a certain predominance as being not only the establishing feature of the media themselves (for what are photographs and film strips at all if not images), but also the very feature that allows them take hold of the consciousness. “I can no longer think what I want to think,” remarks Benjamin of film by quoting Georges Duhamel, “My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”⁴² The image, which is not confined to being visual but also may be of an aural or tactile variety, thus forms the basis of the perceptibility of the artwork; it is the window through which the work impresses itself upon us, and as such forms the fundamental unit of the work of art.

The distinction of the image as being the fundamental building block of the post-auratic artwork nevertheless gives it the dubious distinction of being imbricated in the latter's temporal fallibility. It should be no surprise that the German term for “moment,” Augenblick, has a perceptual connotation in addition to its temporal meaning, particularly in light of Benjamin's understanding of post-auratic art. In film, for instance, the moment is inextricably connected to the singular image (which we will thus call the “momentary image”); its shock effect is an effect of the volatile juxtaposition of the perceptual image with its transitoriness, whereby traditional cognition is “interrupted by [the images'] constant, sudden change.”⁴³ The image is therefore of great significance within the artwork's affiliation with homogeneous time insofar as its duration (or lack thereof) constitutes the potential footing with which consciousness can step outside of the instant or once again fall prey to it. As Benjamin points out in the “Theses” work, it is precisely this radical abruptness of the image that dislodges the perceiver from a critical understanding of her present, pushing her heedlessly into the future:

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...For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.⁴⁴

The problem of the fallow time shows itself to be very much a problem of the image insofar as it serves as the model of perception, lending the visual arts like film and photography a special role in the (mis)shaping of consciousness. The fundamental failure of art to create political consciousness is thus distraction, or rather, its ineptitude to provide an image that endures within consciousness, its inability to allow perception to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”⁴⁵ The re-formation of the work is thus to be found in a re-formation of its constituent image, an image which makes possible a duration while preserving the shock effect of post-auratic artwork that disrupts the status quo. To recreate the image in relation to a different temporal frame would work to sever the work of art's revolutionary power from its emasculating historicity.

To achieve such a change in the historical-political functioning of the work therefore entails a transformation of the perceptual image, one which comes about through its qualitative structural change from its momentary to its dialectical form. For Benjamin, the dialectical image has a drastically different structure from the momentary image which heretofore was the basis of the post-auratic work of art. Reflecting the sort of homogeneous time which belies it (derisively named “historicism” by Benjamin), the momentary image displays itself as having a certain plasticity and flatness. On the one hand, as only one in a series of frames on a cellulose of infinite length, it lacks any vestige of true uniqueness, and as such can only disclose generic “eternal” experiences like stories starting with the phrase “Once upon a time,” which suppose themselves as being somehow universal for all humanity living and dead precisely through this appeal to being blasé.⁴⁶ Likewise, the momentary image lacks a certain depth to it through which it can be grasped in a qualitative manner. The perception of it is thus “additive” rather than “constructive” in the sense that it lacks any meaning apart its co-images; it has a purely quantitative worth that can only “fill the homogeneous, empty time.”⁴⁷ The shock effect extended by the momentary image was not contained in its singularity within consciousness, but rather the quantitative impact it imparts upon perception, much akin to the Kantian mathematical sublime: Like the infinite number of stars in the night sky, it quite simply overruns the imagination with sheer size.

The dialectical image, however, has a much more complex and multifaceted structure in comparison to the momentary image, being capable of disclosing uniqueness and presenting itself as qualitatively significant. Associated with what will amount to Benjamin's conception of “historical materialism,” the dialectical image stands as something unique, something that is not merely a transition to another thing with the persistent flow of momentary time.⁴⁸ Being so, it likewise allows itself to be graspable qualitatively in isolation, whereby it becomes viewable as a entity with a complex structure, as a “configuration pregnant with tensions.”⁴⁹ In opposition to the momentary image, it appears three-dimensional, like a bump on a flat temporal plane which draws attention to itself. It therefore presents itself as a point of stoppage, a barrier which prohibits continued flow:

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions [i.e. the dialectical image], it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.⁵⁰

The shock of the dialectical image is thus not found in the overwhelming experience of quantity, in the relentless flood of stimuli, but rather through an equally jarring abatement of that flow, of thought (in the sense of the perception of the image continuum) at that point of singularity, this insurmountable bump within the continuum of time. Consciousness thus perceives in the dialectical image this entity called a “monad,” which Andrew Benjamin describes as a self-contained entity that exists apart from the logic of reality around it (namely, the continuum of moments in this case), but nonetheless also reflects that reality through its internal organization or constellation.⁵¹ One should therefore understand the “pregnancy” of this entity in the superlative: It is the site in which the boundlessness of reality is transformed into the internal qualities of a infinitesimally small point, just as if the entire universe could be put inside a child's snow globe. Benjamin provides a vivid example of this “snow globe” effect:

'In relation to the history of organic life on earth,' writes a modern biologist, 'the paltry fifty millennial 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.'⁵²

The dialectical image thus achieves its sublime shock upon the individual through this compaction of meaning, whereby the experience of a singular entity, a mere fraction of a second, would subject one to the entire history of humanity since the loincloth within a blink of the eye. Rather than shocking the perceiver through pure distraction, the dialectical image uproots her through the impact of complete lucidity.

This alteration within the work of art from momentary image to dialectical image henceforth creates a radically new form of temporality that initiates the corresponding transformation of the transitory present into the epochal present of the Jetztzeit. Through the pregnant composition of the dialectical image, the temporal succession of past moments under fallow time becomes transposed into the infinitely interrelated whole of the monad. For Benjamin, the dialectical image is a picture of the past; it is a retrospective phenomenon that reconstitutes the rich wholeness of the past as its own dense structure. More specifically, it makes the past completely visible such that every event becomes an element within the monadic constellation. Past history, which heretofore was countable as a series of instants, becomes instead “citable in all its moments,” i.e. it becomes inherent within the monad as uncountable facets of the image.⁵³ Relating back to his illustration of human history above, Benjamin notes that the monadic dialectical image compresses time in a similar manner, whereby it remanifests “the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment.”⁵⁴

However, this monad does not emerge within an antiquarian void without reference to the contemporary; rather, on account of its complete inherence it stands as an immanent critique of the status quo. The dialectical image presents history as a foil to the situation of the present day, as the field of possibility and hope that shows the present to be its fulfillment or failure. In a certain sense, the image enlivens the past to the point at which it gains a critical “life” to our state of the present, as Frederic Jameson points out in the following succinct terms:

We will no longer tend to see the past as some inert and dead object which we are called upon to resurrect, or to preserve, or to sustain, in our won living freedom; rather, the past will itself become an active agent in this process and will begin to come before us as a radically different life form which rises up to call our own form of life into question and to pass judgment on us, and through us, on the social formation in which we exist.⁵⁵

History thus comes to life, and not in a History Channel sense of being enrapturing by its sheer novelty. Instead, it lives in the sense of being a certain yardstick to the present, to the point to which the terms invert themselves: Perceiving the past is no longer a manner of bringing it to the present such that the former becomes legible to the latter, but rather the past becomes the means by which the present makes itself known. Benjamin phrases this reversal in seemingly more optimistic words, corresponding to what might be a more utopistic belief in the dialectical image: The past is not merely just the condemning judge of our present, but serves as the image of both happiness and salvation for our contemporaneous time, the means for realizing those forgone possibilities. The monad shows the past as a building plan for the redemption of the status quo, and in this sense bestows the dialectical image with what Benjamin calls a “weak Messianic power,” i.e. the chance for an earthly day of judgment.⁵⁶ Works of art thus gain a new critical historical dimension through their imposition of the dialectical image: No longer merely ideological “spoils of war,” they now have “a retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present of the rulers.”⁵⁷

In calling forth the past as a critique of the present, the new work of art thus advances a new form of temporality that subverts the crippling effects of fallow progress. As the point of radical quality rather than quantity, the dialectical image refuses to be experienced in a dull, distracted manner across a countless number of instants (like the momentary image); rather, it fixes itself as a singular point within the continuum of history, a “bump” as it has been said. Likewise, history becomes perceptible precisely at this incidence, and as such gains a certain qualitative impact heretofore denied it:

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 the 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.⁵⁸

History, which through the momentary image could only be experienced as a “mass of data to fill the homogeneous empty time,”⁵⁹ now becomes apprehended as a truly unique and singular experience that reveals a “danger” in its juxtaposition to the present. It assaults apperception in a sudden hard impact rather than a peppering of small blows, through which consciousness becomes capable of grasping hold of the moment. In taking hold of history as a monad, however, consciousness endows the present with a raised sense of presence. Through the monad, the perceiver who has this new historicized perception no longer sees his present as a mere transition within a sequence of history, Benjamin claims, but rather “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' [Jetztzeit] which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”⁶⁰ In other words, the monad eschews with the momentary present (Gegenwart) as the fundamental temporal unit in favor of this new conception of a Jetztzeit or “epochal present,”⁶¹ which stands as a radical rather than transitory thematization of the immediate now. History qua Jetztzeit is thus not only an inherent critique of the existing state of affairs, but also stands as a refutation of the temporal scheme that perpetuates its status quo. It is a point at which the regular flow of time is literally stopped, making possible new forms of political action that do not fall prey to the emasculating power of fallow progress. In this sense, Benjamin sees the monad as “the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”⁶² It makes possible both a critical consciousness of the present, but also a “space” for action within time whereby this consciousness can become praxis. It makes suffocating continuum of the moment “explode” open, and thereby reinvigorates the possibilities first found in the post-auratic art for collective political action.⁶³

Thus, art qua the dialectical image shows itself as being the possibility of a revolutionary politics through the establishing of its own temporality based on the epochal present. Art's principle downfall was its heretofore dependence on the momentary image, whose lack of depth and uniqueness maintained art within the sphere of fallow time. In its stead, the dialectical image appears as a unique, deep, and complex entity capable preserving the shock effect while disclosing qualitative aspects rather than just sheer quantity. As such, it creates a new temporality insofar as it first transposes history into a pregnant configuration that stands as an immanent foil to the present state of affairs. By doing so, it transforms itself into an extreme bringing-forth of the now or Jetztzeit, which stands as a break within the existing forms of temporality.

III. Conclusion: What is the Dialectical Artwork?

Not having given us a description of how the work of art is transformed in this transition from momentary image to dialectical image, Benjamin leaves open the question as to what such a work would look like, for this is not a trivial change. One the one hand, in vanquishing the momentary image, he seems to be distancing himself from his own conception of post-auratic art, which gain significance precisely through this effect of the momentary image. Film, for instance, seems inextricably connected to the momentary image; it is clearly impossible to think of a sort of film that does not really on the technical apparatus of the persistently changing image. Indeed, if the history of cinematography since 1939 is any witness, this rapidity of the image seems to drastically accelerate with the increasing accustoming of the public to split-second shots and rapid jumps. On the other hand, by preserving the shock effect via the dialectical image, he seems to suggest that there is a new possibly technical frontier to which post-auratic art may still go. Indeed, if we take the shock value to be the defining criterion of post-auratic art, this leaves open the possibility that there could be “post-post-auratic” media that are capable of the seemingly impossible Jetztzeit. In pointing out the role that surrealism had in Benjamin's account of experience, Peter Osborne shows that form of expression to be perhaps the guide for even new types of media,⁶⁴ a claim one could model on his own description of how the shock effect of Dada anticipated, but was not just copied by, the shock effect of film.⁶⁵ In the end, the question therefore remains open as to whether such a artwork qua dialectical image has or will achieve in a radically new medium.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Andrew. "Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 216-250.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 69-82.

Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 253-264.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 217-252.

Bernstein, J.M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Aleination from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Günther, Henning. Walter Benjamin: Zwischen Marxismus und Theologie. Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag Olten, 1974.

Hegel, G. W. F. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, tr. Bernard Bosanquet. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, tr. Albert Hofstadter. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993.

Jameson, Frederic. "Marxism and Historicism." New Literary History, Anniversary Issue, vol. 11 (Autumn 1979), pp. 41-73.

Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. New York: Verso, 1998.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Kelly, Micheal. Iconoclasm in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Kockelmans, Joesph J. Heidegger on Art and Art Works. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, tr. Chris Turner. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1990.

Long, Christopher P. "Art's Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger, Art and Politics," New German Critique, Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, vol. 83 (Spring-Summer 2001), pp. 89-115.

Osborne, Peter. "Small-scale Victories, Lange-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin's Poltics of Time," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 59-109.

Plate, S. Brent. Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Rochlitz, Rainer. The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, tr. Jane Marie Todd. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.

Schlegel, Friedrich. "Über Goethes Meister" in Kritische und theoretische Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1978, pp. 143-164.

Seubold, Günter. Das Ende der Kunst und der Paradigmenwechsel in der Ästhetik. Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1997.

Weigel, Sigrid. Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, tr. Georgina Paul, et. al. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Young, Julian. Heidegger's Philosophy of Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

1G. W. F. Hegel. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, tr. Bernard Bosanquet. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 13.

2Originally planned as a comparison between Benjamin's work and Heidegger's lecture “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which also first appeared in 1935, this paper will occasionally make mention of the parallel treatment of the work of art as a historical-political phenomenon contained in the latter. Despite having a great deal of similarity with Benjamin's concern with the work of art, Heidegger nevertheless espouses what will be a historically reestablishing function to it.

3Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 242 (Epilogue). Subsequent citations of this source will note subsection numbers in parentheses.

4Quoted in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political. tr. Chris Turner. (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1990), p. 62.

5Heidegger likewise sees the incursion of technology into the production of the work of art as a contentious issue as well, albeit for a markedly different reason. For him, the loss of aura does not provide the possibility of a politics of liberation, but rather stands as the immanent crisis within Western civilization. In particular, the concept of artistic production as herstellen implicates Heidegger's account of art as technē in a tacit polemic against Reproduktion, which Heidegger associates with the overrunning of technē with technologization. The particular event horizon of the artwork for Heidegger is thus its confrontation with a present temporality of Gleichgültigkeit, which, like Benjamin's moment, remains acquiescent in political agency. It should be noticed that the desired form of political agency that falls out here is quite at odds with Benjamin's conception, and, indeed, would seem to realize precisely the opposite goal of aestheticizing politics, which puts him in an enigmatic sympathy with the National Socialist agenda for art, although their destruction of the aura in art would put him finally at odds with them. Cf. Andrew Benjamin. "Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 225; J. M. Bernstein. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Aleination from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 108-116; Philippe Lacoue-Larthe, p. 54, 61-86; Christopher P. Long "Art's Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger, Art and Politics," New German Critique, Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, vol. 83 (Spring-Summer 2001), pp. 97-101.

6W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Preproduction,” pp. 223-224 (IV).

7Ibid, p. 220 (II).

8Ibid, pp. 224-225 (V).

9Ibid, p. 221 (II).

10Ibid.

11Ibid, p. 239 (XV).

12Ibid, p. 221 (II).

13Ibid, p. 226 (VI).

14Frederic Jameson. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 11.

15W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 238 (XIV).

16Ibid, p. 236 (XIII).

17Ibid, p. 223 (III).

18Ibid, p. 235 (XII).

19Ibid, p. 231 (X).

20Ibid, p. 239 (XV).

21Ibid, p. 241-242 (Epilogue).

22Lacoue-Labarthe, p. 61-70.

23W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 232 (X).

24Ibid, p. 242 (Epilogue).

25S. Brent Plate. Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts. (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 119.

26W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 231 (X).

27Ibid, p. 219 (I).

28W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 219 (I).

29Ibid, p. 291 (I).

30Ibid, p. 226 (VI).

31Ibid, p. 236 (XIII).

32Cf. Ibid, p. 238 (XIV).

33Ibid, p. 240 (XV).

34Walter Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) , p. 261 (XIII). Subsequent citations of this source will note subsection numbers in parentheses. This work is sometimes know by the title “On the Concept of History.”

35Ibid, p. 261-262 (XV).

36Ibid, p. 260-261 (XIII).

37Ibid, p. 259, 260 (XI, XII).

38Ibid, p. 257-258 (IX).

39A. Benjamin, p. 217. Andrew Benjamin was in fact making this point for both Benjamin and Heidegger.

40Likewise, although the event horizon present by Heidegger's formulation of the work's present is different from Benjamin's (cf. footnote 5), the response which he finds in his subsequent formulation of the work of art has more than a coincidental resemblance to Benjamin's. Art breaks through the temporality of Gleichgültigkeit first of all through its createdness as an open space of truth opened up by strife, which achieves an analogous function as the monad with Benjamin. Whereas Benjamin's over-wrought monad construes art as essentially the image, Heidegger however renders it as poetry, as an example from Friedrich Schlegel would demonstrate. As such, the work of art instigates its own epochal present as the unique moment of founding (rather than disjunction), which initiates a people upon its appointed task. Cf. Micheal Kelly. Iconoclasm in Aesthetics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 37-41; Friedrich Schlegel. "Über Goethes Meister" in Kritische und theoretische Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen. (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1978), pp. 143-164.

41Howard Caygill. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 81. Caygill goes on to assert that the image as an experiential unit is offset by the rival concept of text within Benjamin, whereby the latter is the basis of political experience. While in the light of his evidence, this argument does seem convincing, he seems to have missed the political dimension of the image within Benjamin's “Theses” essay, which this essay will flesh out more completely. Sigrid Weigel, for instance, does not support as strong of a distinction between written and visual forms, whereby writing is often seen as a transubstantiation of the experiential image into text. Likewise, Peter Osborne points to the Surrealist model of the image as the basis of historical experience for Benjamin, and thus forfeits the written text a role as political experience. Cf. Peter Osborne. "Small-scale Victories, Lange-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin's Poltics of Time," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 59-109; Sigrid Weigel. Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, tr. Georgina Paul, et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1996) p. 51-52.

42W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Preproduction,” p. 238 (XIV).

43Ibid, p. 238 (XIV).

44W. Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," p. 255 (V).

45Ibid, p. 225 (VI).

46Ibid, p. 262 (XVI).

47Ibid, p. 262 (XVII).

48Ibid, p. 262 (XVI).

49Ibid, p. 262 (XVII).

50Ibid, p. 262-263 (XVII).

51A. Benjamin, p. 237.

52W. Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," p. 263 (XVIII).

53Ibid, p. 254 (III).

54Ibid, p. 263 (XVIII).

55Frederic Jameson. "Marxism and Historicism." New Literary History, Anniversary Issue, vol. 11 (Autumn 1979), p. 70. Although he refers to Benjamin in passing, Jameson develops a largely analogous argument in this essay, albeit without Benjamin's optimistic outlook in the possibility of genuine revolution à la the Jetztzeit.

56W. Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," p. 254 (III-IV).

57Ibid, p. 255 (IV).

58Ibid, p. 255 (VI).

59Ibid, p. 262 (XVII).

60Ibid, p. 263 (A).

61Andrew Benjamin uses this term “epochal present” as a common term for Benjamin's Jetztzeit and Heidegger's moment of establishing.

62W. Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," p. 263 (XVII).

63A noteworthy convergence between the vocabulary of Benjamin and Heidegger occurs at this point (which would have been fleshed out in the complete version of this paper). Both of these figures refer to the inaugurating aspect of epochal present as a sort of leap (Sprung) into history. The difference between these two subsequently becomes fleshed out in this conception insofar as Benjamin's leap is a pseudo-Utopian gesture, one that can never be completely realized according to Peter Osborne, while Heidegger's primal leap (Ur-Sprung) truly realizes its objective in the founding of a people. Cf. Osborne, pp. 88-89.

64Cf. Osborne, pp. 61-69.

65Cf. W. Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," pp. 237-238 (XIV).