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The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film
The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film
Theory
Author(s): Richard W. Allen
Source: New German Critique, No. 40, Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory (Winter, 1987),
pp. 225-240
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488139
Accessed: 27-09-2016 13:59 UTC
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by Richard W. Allen
There can be no aesthetic of the cinema, not even
a purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema.'
Theodor W. Adomo
In contemporary film theory one may delineate two types of argument to account for the nature of the fascination of film both of which
ship between the image and what the image depicts.2 In contrast t
*Many thanks to Miriam Hansen for her encouragement and guidance in the writing o
this paper. Thanks also to Thomas Elsaesser and Paul Willemen for their comments on
an earlier draft.
2. See Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" in What is Cinema?
vol. 1, selected and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor
nia Press, 1967), pp. 9-16.
225
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tention that the shots of a film are isolated and edited from a specific
point of view and that, for example, two versions of the same story or de-
pictions of the same place may be entirely different.3 The point is that a
film image, other things being equal (i.e., in the absence of specific sub-
tween the intentionality and non-intentionality of the object is isomorphic to a contrast in the subjective apprehension of the object between
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with more resonance, a'lack', which is temporarily assuaged by identification with the character's look in the reverse-field, and so on. In the
light of empirical criticisms that the system of reverse-field cutting is not
The argument from enunciation depends on the relationship between fantasy and the reality-effect of the image established by the
ontological argument. However, the ontological argument does not entail the argument from enunciation. Interpreted in psychoanalytic
terms, the ontological argument suggests a regression to a point prior to
the formation of the ego, but it does not depend upon a psychoanalytic
conception of subjectivity for its coherence. Insofar as the point of the
ontological argument is to foreground the contrast between cinema and
the traditional arts, between fantasy and imagination or contemplation,
it can be made equally forcefully outside the terms of psychoanalytic
theory as within them.8 By contrast, the enunciative argument recognizes the fact, so to speak, that you can only have fantasy when you have
an ego and the 'lack' that goes with it. It depends upon a psychoanalytic
concept of the 'subject in discourse' that is incommensurable with 'normal' conceptions of subjectivity and aesthetic experience. As Geoffrey
7. Stephen Heath, "Notes on Suture," Screen 18:4 (Winter 1977-1978), reprinted as
"On Suture" in Questions of Cinema (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), p. 101.
The criticisms of suture theory are to be found in Barry Salt, "Film Style and Technology
in the Forties," Film Quarterly (Fall 1977), 46-57, and William Rothman, "Against the System of the Suture," Film Quarterly (Fall 1975), 45-50, reprinted in Nichols, ed., Movies and
Methods, pp. 451-59.
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field cutting, as described by the system of the suture, is not simply one
the viewer's look at the image. The fourth look, of a different order to the other three, is
the possibility to look out at the spectator from the fiction. See Paul Willeman, "Letter to
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ema, and indeed other mass media, can be conceptualized only in the
light of the historical transformation of experience in modernity. The
traditional subject of aesthetic experience is no longer appropriate, because subjectivity has undergone an internal transformation along with
the nature of aesthetic experience. In fact, the theory of cinematic fascination which emerges from these writers is historical in two senses. Not
merely is this fascination necessarily predicated on the experience of
modernity, but it implies a subjectivity that itself undergoes historical
transformation. Modernity is thus characterized as being thoroughly
historical and cinematic fascination becomes an exemplary feature of
this experience. My argument turns on the development of a conception of cinema as a form of intersubjective experience, called distraction
by Benjamin, which mediates between the spheres of public and private
experience. Breaking with past forms of aesthetic experience, the cine-
and Adorno.
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13. See Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"
(1916), in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken,
1986), pp. 314-32. For Benjamin, language or denotative relation between word and
thing: "The word after the fall must communicate something (other than itself). That is
really the fall of language-mind." (p. 327).
14. Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty" (1933), in Reflections, p. 335. An earlier version of the essay, "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933), is trans. by Knut Tarnowski in New
German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 65-69.
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versely art, while it can express this unity, can only intimate knowle
since it is abstracted from the concrete language of cognition.
In Dialectic ofEnlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer echo Benjamin
account in the "Artwork" essay of the affinity between auratic art
the fetish of primitive ritual:
It is the nature of the work of art, or aesthetic semblance, to
be what the new, terrifying occurrence became in the primitive's magic; the appearance of the whole in the particular. In
the work of art that duplication still occurs by which the thing
appeared as spiritual, as the expression of mana. This constitutes its aura."'15
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tional artwork:
puts himself into it will feel it blowing toward him like the
cool wind of the coming dawn. It becomes apparent that art,
which has often been considered resistant in any connection
to progress, can give the latter its true determination. Progress
lodges, not in the continuity of the course of time, but rather
in its moments of interference: where the truly new first
makes itself felt with the sobriety of the dawn.20
However, as we have seen, traditional art also embodies the impossibility of reconciliation; in its very abstraction from progress as traditionally conceived, it remains esoteric and mystical. If modernity offers a
new vision of reconciliation it is that the mimetic capacity finds expression in the very realm where it seemed to be denied. For Benjamin, the
debris of the Paris Arcades mimes the reified world in a manner akin to
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is to be conceptualized.
has suggested, "film is more than an epistemological tool for the mate
alist intellectual." While representation on film mimes the reified wor
it does not do so in the sense of merely reproducing it, since "it is its
part of the historical process or crisis of which the urban masses are t
Buck-Morss. See "Walter Benjamin - Revolutionary Writer (I)," New Left Review 1
(July/August 1981), pp. 50-75, "Walter Benjamin - Revolutionary Writer (II)," New Le
Review 12:9 (Sept/Oct 1981), pp. 75-95, and "Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Redeem
Mass Culture for the Revolution," New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer 1983),
211-40.
22. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), in
Illuminations, p. 238.
23. The above quotations are from Miriam Hansen's paper, "The Blue Flower in
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intentionless aspect of technological reproduction, to a process of collective signification. With the auratic shell broken, mimetic experience
can once again take on a public intersubjective signifying form. It is a
reconciliation at the level of aesthetic experience forged by the penetra25. Habermas, "Consciousness Raising or Redemptive Criticism," p. 47.
26. For Kracauer's understanding of distraction see "The Cult of Distraction,"
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tion of technology into art. However, undoubtedly in the "Artwork" essay, Benjamin wishes to go much further. In the light of Benjamin's peculiar brand of eschatological Marxism, modernity not only offers a new
and universal form of aesthetic experience, it offers a possiblity of reconciliation which goes beyond the aesthetic realm.
The concept of distraction as shock has an aspect which expresses the
very entrance into modernity and not merely the experience of a subjectivity which has already learned to live with the exigencies of modem
life. Film might be said to mime this experience in that it too can provoke, quite commonly, a visceral sense of shock, a phenomenon which
is intimately tied to its technological foundations. But Benjamin would
like to link this visceral sense of shock to a cognitive dimension whereby
distraction jolts the spectator out of an unreflective mode of apprehen-
formation of consciousness that it provokes is linked to its ability to represent the masses.30 Finally, the intersubjective aspect of the medium
here is a direct expression of the fact that film is a mass medium which is
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simply that film under capitalism is a commodity, it is that film reproduces the structure of the commodity in the aesthetic realm. The relationship between image and referent in the mechanically reproduced
image mirrors the relationship established between use value and exchange value in the commodity. Just as use value appears to ensure that
exchange value can function as an index of need, so the referent appears
to anchor the image in reality.32 Doubly infused with the rationality of
the exchange function, the aesthetic experience of film does indeed offer a reconciliation of instrumental reason and mimetic experience. It
marks the historical synthesis of traditional experience and the mechanisms of advertising with their calculated appeal to the apparent needs
of an ideal universalized consumer. This, for Adorno, is a false reconci-
issue.
33. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso,
1974), pp. 235-38.
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1954) in Mass Culture eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David White (Glencoe, Il: Free Press,
1957), p. 480.
35. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 24.
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wrest its a priori collectivity from the mechanisms of unconscious and irrational influence and enlist this collectivity in
the service of emancipatory intentions.36
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Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles
nia Press, 1979), pp. 61-66. See also Miriam Hansen's important c
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American cinema.
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