Forrest 012223298

The Dialectics of Cinematic Estrangement:
Walter Benjamin, Habit, and the Radical Possibilities of Film
Tara Forrest
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree

of Master of Arts (Honours)
School of Theatre, Film and Dance

The University of New South Wales
December, 1999.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction ............................................................................................. 1
Part 1 -The Dialectics of Cinematic Estrangement:

Distraction and Habit ............................................................................. 7
1.1 The Aura, Contemplation and Distraction .............................. 22
1.2 The Radical Possibilities of Film ................................................ 32
1.3 The Face of the City ....................................................................... 38
Part 2 - Searing the Subject:

Urban Shock and Aesthetic Experience ........................................... 51
2.1 Aesthetics and Anaesthetics ....................................................... 52
2.2 Habit and Boredom ...................................................................... 71
2.3 'Customer Feedback' .................................................................... 78
Conclusion ............................................................................................ 88
Bibliography......................................................................................... 93
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor Jodi Brooks

for introducing me to the work of Walter Benjamin as an
undergraduate, and for her support and inspiration both prior to,
and throughout the course of this project. Jodi has meticulously
read and commented on a number of drafts of this thesis, as has
Demetrios Douramanis, whose insights and enthusiasm have
provided much sustenance. Thank-you also to Erin Brannigan for
proof-reading the thesis so diligently in the final stages. Last but not
least, I would also like to thank Mim, Wes and Andy Forrest for
their support and encouragement, and the School of Theatre, Film
and Dance at The University of New South Wales, and the
Department of Writing, Social and Cultural Studies at The
University of Technology Sydney, for generously providing me
with the opportunity to teach throughout the course of this project.
'Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting
and banal. It requires ignorance, nothing more. But to
lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest -
that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards
and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must
speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet
in the forest.'
Walter Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle'.

1
Introduction
What in the end makes advertisements so superior to

criticism? Not what the moving red neon says, but the
fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.
Walter Benjamin, 'This Space For Rent'l
In 'This Space for Rent' Benjamin describes how the spectatorial

relationship cultivated by film differs significantly from the way
that the contemplative critic engages with an artwork such as a
painting. In this short fragment from 'One-Way Street' which
anticipates a number of concerns that he was to elaborate ten years
later in his 1935/36 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction'2, he argues that the manner in which
the critic engages with a painting is characterised by a certain
distance; a distance which is manifested at the level of the distance
between the critic and the painting that provides the space for
analysis and interpretation. For Benjamin, this attentive,
concentrated gaze stands in contrast to the distracted mode of
perception brought about by the hubbub of everyday life in the city.
1 Walter Benjamin, 'One-Way Street' in One-Way Street and Other Writings

trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1997)
pp.89-90.
2 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press,
1992) pp.211-244. (Hereafter referred to as 'Work of Art'.)
2
In contrast to the painting, he argues that the shock-like

organisation (and sensation) of film cultivates a spectatorial
relationship that is analogous to the mode of perception brought
about by urbanisation; the distracting element of which 'is based
upon changes of place and focus which periodically assail the
spectator'.3 For Benjamin, what is significant about the manner in
which film 'hurtles' itself at the spectator, is that its 'insistent,
jerky, nearness'4 breaks down both the distance that enables the
critic to situate him or herself in a position of sovereignty in
relation to the painting, and the bourgeois-humanist conceptions
of personality and experience upon which this contemplative
relationship is based.S
However, when we turn to Benjamin's 1939 essay 'Some Motifs in

Baudelaire'6, we begin to get a sense of the significant costs with
which the disintegration of contemplation in the face of shock is
associated; costs which he traces, in this essay, via a discussion of
the atrophy of experience brought about by the shock-effect of
urbanisation. Drawing on Freud's analysis (in 'Beyond the Pleasure
3 Walter Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.231.

4 Benjamin, 'One-Way Street', p.89.
5 Miriam Hansen, 'Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street', Critical Inquiry
(Winter, 1999) p.310 (Hereafter referred to as 'Benjamin and Cinema').
6 Walter Benjamin, 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire' in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric
Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London and New York:
Verso, 1997) pp.109-154.
3
Principle' 7) of the role that consciousness plays as a shield that

protects the organism from excess energies, Benjamin argues that
the distracted mode of perception cultivated by shock wards off
stimuli from the realm in which they could leave behind an
imprint in memory. As I will discuss in detail in this thesis, this
process seals off the urban dweller from the possibility of
experience.
However, in the 'Work of Art' essay, Benjamin also provides us

with the contours of a distracted mode of perception that is not
defined by the rapid changes in space and focus with which his
delineation of the distracted mode of perception cultivated by
shock is, in accounts of Benjamin's argument, ordinarily
associated. Although the distracted mode of perception that he
outlines, in this instance, also lacks the focus and concentration
that characterises the manner in which the contemplative critic
engages with an artwork such as a painting, it is not defined by a
jerky, proximate relationship to stimuli, but rather by a distance
from, a kind of spacing out from one's environment. This mode of
distracted perception - which Benjamin describes in terms of habit
- is built on the back of what he refers to as 'a tactile appropriation'
of one's environment.8 He writes:' ... [T]he ability to master certain
7 Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' in On Metapsychology (Volume

11, The Penguin Freud Library) ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey
(Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1991) pp.275-338.
8 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.233.
4
tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become

a matter of habit' .9
While Benjamin's habit oriented delineation of distraction (and

the mode of appropriation upon which it is grounded) has
received little attention in discussions of his work, in this thesis I
will argue that Benjamin's delineation of habit plays a significant
role in his analysis of the radical possibilities associated with the
distracted mode of perception cultivated by film.10 By reading
Benjamin's thoughts about habit across - and in relation to - a
range of his writings, I will show how the desensitised,
absentminded manner in which the habituated urban dweller
engages with her or his environment, both perpetuates the
atrophy of experience brought about by shock, and bears the traces
through which that atrophy can be countered. While I do not want
to argue that there is anything radical about habit in its own right, I
am interested in the way that certain film and video practices can
open up the spectator to aspects of commonplace milieus which
have been appropriated by habit.
As will become clear throughout the course of my argument, these

possibilities are associated not with a capacity which is specific to

10 The only critic I have come across to explore Benjamin's comments about habit in
any detail is Michael Taussig. See his 'Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds' in
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge,
1993) pp.19-32, and 'Tactility and Distraction' in The Nervous System (New York:
Routledge, 1992) pp. 141-148.
5
film, but with the camera's capacity to reveal what Benjamin, in

the 'Work of Art' essay and 'A Small History of Photography',
describes as 'unconscious optics'. Although Benjamin argues that it
is through photography that we first discover the existence of this
optical unconsciousll, I will argue that photography falls short of
the radical possibilities that he associates with film in this regard,
because of the way that the photograph is structurally limited in its
capacity to disrupt the contemplative spectatorial relationship that
Benjamin - in 'This Space For Rent' and 'The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction' - disparages.
The film and video examples that I discuss in this thesis have been
selected, not because I think that they live up to the film practice
for which Benjamin argues, but because they bear certain
characteristics which resonate strongly with aspects of the kind of
imaging practice that he describes. Most notable in this regard is
the way that their shock-like reconfiguration of commonplace
environments, both breaks down the distance that characterises
the manner in which the contemplative critic engages with a
traditional work of art, and resensitises the spectator to aspects of
his or her environment (the facade of a building, the blur of a
train, sizzling neon reflected in the pavement) which are
ordinarily traversed in a desensitised, absentminded state.
11 Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography' in One-Way Street, p.243.

6
While this thesis is concerned with tracing the radical possibilities

that Benjamin associates with the distracted mode of perception
cultivated by film, I will argue that these possibilities resonate
strongly with the radical effects that Benjamin associates with a
range of different practices, including - but not limited to - his
experiments with hashish, and the effects of estrangement brought
about by travel. While I do not want to argue that there is anything
intrinsically radical about the newfound relationship of proximity
to urban environments that Benjamin associates with each of
these practices, my argument revolves around the way that this
close, tactile spectatorial relationship to stimuli can serve as a
medium through which the urban dweller can experience his or
her environment - and as a consequence, him or herself - in a
radically different manner.
7
Partl
The Dialectics of Cinematic Estrangement:

Distraction and Habit
For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never

again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame
darted; each cornerstone sprayed sparks and every
tram came toward me like a fire engine.
Walter Benjamin, 'One-Way Street'.1
I like to imagine that Benjamin is writing about walking home

from the movies. Not just any movie, but a city film like Walter
Ruttman's 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, or Joris Iven's
1929 Rain; montage driven films which hurtle (like flashing neon
or a speeding train) towards the body of the viewer. I picture him
leaving the cinema and being taken aback by the commotion of the
city; its familiar goings on rendered magically strange by the jarring
configuration of the urban environs of Berlin or Rain; where
slippery wet neon, the hubbub of a station, the facade of a building
reflected in the pavement, flash up and disappear again like a fast
moving train.
1 Walter Benjamin, 'One Way Street', pp.68-69.

8
But Benjamin isn't writing about walking through the city after
going to the cinema. The passage is taken from 'Ordnance'; a
fragment in 'One Way Street' describing his arrival in Riga to visit
Asja Lads. He writes: 'Her house, the town, the language were
unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me, no one knew me'. 2
So for two hours he wanders around in a state of distracted

solitude, his unfamiliarity with Riga affording him a sensitive,
proximate relationship to the goings on of the city. Trams scream
across his path like fire-engines and lights shoot toward him with
the power of an ordnance.
And yet - as Benjamin points out later in 'One Way Street' - this
close, tactile relationship to an environment with which one has
not yet become habituated is always short lived. As soon as you
begin to find your bearings in a place, as soon as those trams and
streets become paths to a friend's house or means for getting you to
work on time, the palpability of their initial impression - of
colours and details which impress themselves upon the body of
the urban dweller - seems to dissipate. As the routes between
home and the station, work and the carpark, home and the
supermarket become well travelled paths, that close, tactile
relationship to stimuli (so palpably captured by Benjamin's
snapshot of his arrival in Riga) grows into an insensitivity to, a

9
spacing out from that environment.3 Once habit - Benjamin writes

in 'One Way Street' - has begun to do its work, 'that earliest picture
[of fire-licking asphalt and trams which race towards you like fire-
engines] can never be restored'.4
And yet there is much in Benjamin's writing that points to

practices through which the habituated urban dweller can
experience his or her environment - and as a consequence, him or
herself - in a radically different manner. The practices which
Benjamin discusses include, amongst others, his experiments with
drugs (mainly hashish, but also opium and mescalin), urban
flanerie, travel, love, and melancholy. While I will touch on some
of these examples here, I want to focus on Benjamin's accounts of
his experiments with hashish, because they serve as an
introduction to the role that certain states of intoxication can play
in fostering a different kind of relationship to habitually traversed
3 In 'A Berlin Chronicle' Benjamin argues that that which underlies his 'present
intercourse with the city's streets' is '[a]bove all, a gaze which appears to see not
a third of what it takes in'. p.294. Siegfried Kracauer is more instructive in this
regard. Under the subheading of 'The Familiar' in Theory of Film (published in
1960), he writes: 'Nor do we perceive the familiar ... Intimate faces, streets we
walk day by day, the house we live in - all these things are part of us like our
skin, and because we know them by heart we do not know them with the eye. Once
integrated into our existence, they cease to be objects of perception'. Siegfried
Kracauer, Theory of Film (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997)
pSS.
4 Benjamin, 'One-Way Street', p.78 The passage reads in full: 'What makes the
very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and
irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit
has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape
vanishes at a stroke like the facade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained
preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we
begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored.'
10
environments.s
Moreover, I want to argue that Benjamin's accounts of the effects

of hashish bear a close relationship to the radical effects that he
attributes to the distracted mode of perception cultivated by film in
'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; effects
which are lost in critical accounts of Benjamin's argument that
seek to conflate distraction with either a Brechtian concept of
distanciation, or more commonly, some idea of diversion or
escapism; that is, a means through which the masses can escape
from their worries by submerging themselves in a realm apart
5 Benjamin's records of these sessions (dating from 1927 - 1934) are collected in
Ober Haschisch, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1972). A selection of these writings has recently been published in English in
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934, eds. Michael Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
England: Harvard University Press, 1999). (Hereafter referred to as Selected
Writings, Volume 2). See Benjamin's 'Main Features of my Second Impression of
Hashish', pp.85-90, 'Hashish, Beginning of March 1930', pp.327-330, 'Myslovice-
Braunschweig-Marseille', pp.386-393, and 'Hashish in Marseille', pp.673 679.
Not included in this volume are 'Crocknotizen' and most of the material from
'Protokolle'. See Ober Haschisch, pp.57-61 and 65-143 respectively. See also
Benjamin's comments on the role that his analysis of the effects of hashish play
in his philosophical observations more generally, in a letter to his friend Gerhard
Scholem, dated January 30, 1928: 'The notes I made, in part independently, in part
relying on the written record of the experiment, may well turn out to be a very
worthwhile supplement to my philosophical observations, with which they are
most intimately related, as are to a certain degree even my experiences while
under the influence of the drug.' Included in The Correspondence of Walter
Benjamin: 1910-1940, eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans.
Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1994) p.323.
11
from their everyday.6
As I will discuss in the first part of this thesis, the film practice for
which Benjamin argues would not seek to immerse the audience
in a realm apart from their environment, but rather - as per his
analysis of the radical effects of hashish - would attempt to
resensitise the audience to aspects of their environment which are
ordinarily traversed in a desensitised, absentminded manner.
As Benjamin outlines in 'Mysolovice-Braunschweig-Marseille',

his experiments with drugs are not fuelled by an escapist desire to
immerse himself in a realm apart from his environment. On the
contrary, he is interested in the way that certain stimulants (and
stimuli) can estrange him from - and thereby, paradoxically, re-
situate him in a relationship of proximity to - aspects of his
environment which are ordinarily traversed in a desensitised,
absentminded manner. He writes:
6 Benjamin distinguishes his understanding of distraction from its more common

associations with 'escapism' or 'diversion' via a contrast with Duhamel.
'Duhamel', Benjamin writes, 'calls the movie "a pastime for helots, a diversion
for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their
worries[ ... ,] a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no
intelligence[ ... ,] which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other
than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a "star" in Los Angeles."' Benjamin,
'Work of Art', p. 232. As I will discuss in detail, this 'loss of self' differs
significantly from the more radical 'loss of self' brought about by the mode of
estrangement that I will be discussing throughout the course of this thesis.
12
I do not believe that what induced me to take some hashish at

around seven o'clock in the evening, upstairs in my room, was the
unworthy desire to escape my depressed mood. It is more likely
that this was an attempt to yield entirely to the magic hand with
which the city had gently taken hold of me by the scruff of the
neck. 7
Benjamin describes an encounter with this 'magical hand' (or

'magic wand' as he otherwise refers to it) in his account of the
effects of hashish in 'Hashish in Marseille', where he experiences a
close, tactile relationship to the urban environment he has
inhabited for some time, after he has become accustomed to that
environment.8 The drug places him in a kind of 'trance' (Rausch)
and yet it is a very different state to the absentminded, automated
state produced by habit. If the latter condition is marked by a
distance from, an insensitivity to environmental stimuli,
Benjamin's 'hashish trance' induces in him a sense of proximity
to, a physiognomic sensitivity to his environment. Details burst
into focus, nuances become tangible, the colours around him grow
brighter.9
7 Walter Benjamin, 'Myslovice - Braunschweig - Marseille', trans. Rodney

Livingstone, Selected Writings, Vol. 2 , p.389.
8 Walter Benjamin, 'Hashish in Marseille', trans. Edmund Jephcott, Selected
Writings, Vol. 2. The reference to the magic wand appears on p. 678.
9 The dialectics of 'trance' (as defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary ) are
interesting in this regard: 'l. a sleeplike or half-conscious state without response
to stimuli ... 3. a state of extreme exaltation or rapture; ecstasy.' The Concise
Oxford Dictionary (Eighth Edition) ed. R.E. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
p.1295.
13
However Benjamin's hashish trance does more than render him

sensitive to ordinarily imperceptible aspects of his environment.
As Hermann Schweppenhauser (in one of the few articles to
discuss Benjamin's writings on hashish in relation to his concept
of experience) writes, this 'increase in sensitivity is not an end in
itself, but a medium'lO - a 'medium', I would add, through which a
different spatio-temporal relationship to his environment arises.
In his 'preliminary remark' to 'Hashish in Marseille', Benjamin

writes:
One of the first signs that hashish is beginning to take effect is a

dull feeling of foreboding; something strange, ineluctable is
approaching ... Images and chains of images, long-submerged
memories appear ... All this does not occur in a continuous
development; rather, it is typified by a continual alternation of
dreaming and waking states, a constant and finally exhausting
oscillation between totally different worlds of consciousness ... 11
I want to emphasise this sense of 'oscillation' (' ... Hin-und

Hergeworfenwerden zwischen ... '12) - defined in electrical terms as
'a high frequency alternation as across a spark-gap'13 - because it
gives us a sense of the dialectically charged nature of the
10 Hermann Schweppenhauser, 'Propaedeutics of Profane Illumination' in On

Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Lloyd
Spencer, Stephan Jost and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
England: The MIT Press, 1995) p.35.
11 Benjamin, 'Hashish in Marseille', p.673.
12 Benjamin, 'Haschisch in Marseille' in Ober Haschisch, p.45.
13 The Concise Oxford Dictionary, p.839.
14
relationship to his environment that Benjamin is talking about.

He writes:
At such hours, people and things behave like those little stage
sets and figurines made of elder pith in the glazed tin-foil box,
which, when the glass is rubbed, become electrically charged and
fall at every movement into the most unusual relationships.14
While it is the hashish that lays the ground for these relationships
by rendering Benjamin 'tender' to ordinarily imperceptible aspects
of his environmentlS, it is through a series of charged, momentary
connections with these details that a different world of
consciousness arises. Crucial here is that this consciousness is not
dependent for its existence upon the attention or concentration of
the subject. 'This process', Benjamin writes, 'may result in the
production of images that are so extraordinary, so fleeting, and so
rapidly generated that we can do nothing but gaze at them ... ' .16 In
'Hashish in Marseille', these images - a fringe blowing in the wind,
the contour of the pavement, the glow from a light - function like
'magic wands', or perhaps mimetic sparks. They shoot from
14 Benjamin, 'Hashish in Marseille', p.678.

15 Ibid. p. 674.
16 Ibid. p.329. In 'Hashish - Beginning of March 1930', Benjamin writes: 'In a
normal state of consciousness, this is of course quite impossible. Or rather, such
images do arise - they may even arise constantly - but they remain unconscious. It
is otherwise in a hashish trance. As this very evening proved, there can be an
absolutely blizzard-like production of images, independently of whether our
attention is directed toward anyone or anything else. Whereas in our normal state
free-floating images to which we pay no heed simply remain in the unconscious,
under the influence of hashish images present themselves to us seemingly without
requiring our attention.' Selected Writings, Volume 2, pp.328-329.
15
Benjamin's path and ignite in him traces of other moments;

different, strangely familiar environments. In 'A Berlin
Chronicle', he writes:
[... T]he half-light of habit denies the plate [of remembrance] the
necessary light for years, until one day from an alien source it
flashes as if from burning magnesium powder, and now a snapshot
transfixes the room's image on the plate. Nor is this very
mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the
same time moments when we are beside ourselves, and while our
waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or
passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another
place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of
magnesium powder by the flame of the match.17
A different, though certainly comparable fascination with the way

that certain stimuli can cast a different light on habitually
traversed environments can be found in Marcel Proust' s vignettes
of habit in Remembrance of Things Past (which Benjamin began to
translate with Franz Hessel in 1925).18 As I will discuss in the
second part of this thesis, Proust's work - in particular, his
delineation of the workings of involuntary memory (la memoire
involontaire) - had a significant impact on the development of
17 Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle', pp.342-343.

18 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 1, trans. C.K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Penguin, 1989). For a brief discussion of
the Proust translations, and Benjamin's relationship with Franz Hessel, see
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock
and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England:
Harvard University Press, 1996) pp.513-514. (Hereafter referred to as Selected
Writings, Volume 1).
16
Benjamin's concept of experience.19
The passage from Remembrance of Things Past that I want to

discuss here appears in the 'Overture' to 'Swann's Way', and
revolves around Proust's joy at the speed with which habit
habituates him to his new environment. The place in question is a
childhood bedroom in Combray, the mahogany walls, hostile
violet curtains, pitiless rectangular glass, lofty ceiling and tick-tock,
tick-tocking clock of which Proust finds terrifying. He writes: '[At
night] I lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears
straining, my nostrils flaring, my heart beating'.20 That is until
habit - much to his delight - comes to the rescue. 'Habit, that
skillful but slow-moving arranger,' he writes, ' ... changed the

colour of the curtains, silenced the clock, brought an expression of
pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass ... and appreciably
19 See, for example, Benjamin's comments on the matter in a letter to Gerhard

Scholem, dated July 21, 1925: 'You will have heard the name of Marcel Proust. I
recently decided to translate the main novel in his lengthy cycle of novels,
Remembrance of Things Past [A la recherche du temps perdu]. I am to translate
the three-volume work, Sodom and Gomarrah. [... ] We may have occasionally
spoken about Proust and I have asserted how close his philosophical perspective
is to mine. Whenever I read anything he wrote, I felt we were kindred souls. I am
eager to see whether this feeling will be maintained now that I will be
intimately involved with his work'. And in a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, dated
November 9, 1925, Benjamin writes: '[A]ll my time is devoted to the translation of
Sodom and Gomorrah. The deeper I delve into the text, the more grateful I am for
the circumstances that caused it to be entrusted to me! What I have gained from
having been so deeply involved with this great masterpiece will in time become
very tangible for me'. Both letters are included in The Correspondence of Walter
Benjamin: 1910-1940. See pp. 277-278, and p.285 respectively.
20 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 1, p.8.
17
reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.'21 Proust is appeased
by the transformation, until someone installs a magic lantern in

his bedroom to distract him from his worries and cheer-up his
environment.
However the introduction of a magic lantern (depicting Golo

riding at a jerky trot over a green hill to the castle of Genevieve de
Brabant) to the room to which Proust had finally become
accustomed, proves disastrous. Because the magic lantern
defamiliarises and, in the process, resensitises him to the colours,
shapes and textures of his environment, the palpability of which
had been significantly diminished by habit. He writes:
The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to

think - and to feel - such melancholy things. The door-handle of
my room, which was different to me from all the other door-
handles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own
accord and without my having to tum it, so unconscious had its
manipulation become - lo and behold, it was now an astral body
for Golo. 22
Like the role that Benjamin attributes to hashish, what is at issue

here is the way that the spectre of Golo (his red cloak flapping in
the wind as he envelops the door-handle and charges across the
bedroom curtains) can undo his absentminded distance from, and
insensitivity to stimuli instituted by habit. As Proust writes of his
21 Ibid. pp.8-9
22 Ibid. p.11. (Emphasis mine.)
18
now iridescent bedroom: 'Now I no longer recognised it, and felt

uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where
I had just arrived by train for the first time'. 23
Which brings me back to Benjamin's arrival in Riga, and to his

description of the way that his unfamiliarity with the place affords
him a sensitive, proximate relationship to the goings on of the city.
Like his snapshot of Riga, what interests me about Benjamin's city
portraits - including, amongst others, 'Naples' (which was written
with Asja Lads), 'Moscow', and 'Marseille' in particular 24 - is his
interest in the way that the sensitivity to detail that a foreigner
experiences upon arrival in an unfamiliar city, can shed a different
light on aspects of his or her environment to which he or she has
become habituated.25 As Peter Szondi, in 'Walter Benjamin's City
Portraits' points out, the picturesque and the exotic do not lure
Benjamin into a state of self-forgetfulness, but rather enable him to
see both his own environment, and himself, with an estranged
23 Ibid. p.10.
24 See 'Naples' (1924), 'Moscow' (1927) and 'Marseille' (1928) in One-Way Street,
pp. 167-176, 177-208, and 209-214 respectively. For a detailed account of
Benjamin's trip to Moscow during the Winter of 1926-1927, see his Moscow Diary,
ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
England: Harvard University Press, 1986).
25 The first line of Benjamin's 1927 portrait of Moscow reads: 'More quickly than
Moscow itself, one gets to know Berlin through Moscow'. See 'Moscow', p.177. In
'Hashish in Marseille', Benjamin writes: '[ ... ] I saw only nuances, yet these were
the same. I immersed myself in contemplation of the sidewalk before me, which
through a kind of unguent with which I covered it, could have been, precisely as
these very stones, also the sidewalk of Paris. One often speaks of stones instead of
bread. These stones were the bread of my imagination, which was suddenly seized
by a ravenous hunger to taste what is the same in all places ... ' (My emphasis)
Selected Writings, Volume 2, p. 677.
19
vision.26
What is particularly interesting about Benjamin's cityscapes, and

his 1928 portrait of Marseille in particular, is the way that he
attempts to re-present the city in a manner which both resonates
with - and reproduces for the reader - the sense of estrangement
that Szondi is referring to here; effects which anticipate the radical
possibilities that Benjamin, writing seven years later in 'The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', attributes to film.27
If 'Marseille' is particularly interesting in this regard, then it is
because both its structure and its subject matter resonate strongly
with the kind of film practice that Benjamin outlines in the 'Work
of Art' essay. While the radical possibilities that he ascribes to film
will be discussed in detail throughout the course of this thesis, a
quick detour via Benjamin's montage of Marseille can provide us
with a preliminary sense, not only of the shock-like organisation
and sensation of the film practice that Benjamin is talking about,
but of the way that his unfamiliarity with the city affords him a
capacity of sight akin to the radical capacities that he attributes to
the camera.
26 Peter Szondi, 'Walter Benjamin's City Portraits', trans. Harvey Mendelsohn, in

On Walter Benjamin, p.21. Howard Caygill makes a similar point in his book
Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London and New York: Routledge,
1998) pp.118-119.
27 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', pp.211-244.
20
Constructed out of ten image fragments (the titles of which include

'Walls', 'The light', 'Cathedral', 'Noise', 'Shellfish and Oyster
Stalls') Benjamin's portrait of Marseille cuts between a barrage of
steps, arches, turrets and bridges; the glow from a street lamp, the
facade of a building; a ship in the harbour, a mountain of shellfish.
His eyes pan across walls strewn with "Chocolat Mernier" and the
latest aperitif, to the down and out at nightfall and a beggar in the
street, to rue de Jamai:que and Bar Facultatif. Cut Cut Cut between a
kiosk and a railway station; a cafe and "Les bricks"; a weather
beaten doorframe and the sound of flapping linen.28
And yet the sensitive, proximate spectatorial relationship to the

city that I want to address here isn't predicated on an unfamiliar
place before habituation has taken place. Although not entirely
different, my interest here (as per Benjamin's interest in the effects
of estrangement brought about by the foreigner's experience of an
unfamiliar city) is to think about the ways in which a city film like
Rain or Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (with their close-ups of
street signs and oncoming trains, bustling crowds and neon-soaked
pavements) can resensitise the audience, and thereby foster a
different spatio-temporal relationship to aspects of urban
28 Benjamin, 'Marseille', pp.209-214.

21
environments to which they have become habituated.29
While the picture I am trying to develop is neither causally, nor

experientially the same as Benjamin's description of the effects of
hashish, nor Proust's delineation of the shake-up to his bedroom
(and his countenance) brought about by the installation of a magic
lantern, I have drawn them into a constellation because I think
that together they provide us with a taste of what is experientially
at stake with this tactile, proximate relationship to commonplace
milieus once the anaesthetic effects of habituation have been
obliterated (and in the case of Benjamin's cityscapes, not yet
instated). Lying on his bed, with Golo and his stead charging
around the bedroom, Proust begins to see and to feel the presence
of his door handle, which (like the colour of the curtains and the
29 In contrast to 'Marseille', 'Moscow' is not structured out of a series of image

fragments. And yet despite this, a number of passages in 'Moscow' read - and feel -
like a rapidly edited sequence from a city film. He writes, for example: 'Beams of
excessive brilliance from the car headlights race through the darkness. The
horses of the cavalry, who have a large drill ground in the Kremlin, shy in their
light. Pedestrians force their way between cars and unruly horses. Long rows of
sleighs transport snow away. Single horsemen. Silent swarms of ravens have
settled in the snow. The eye is infinitely busier than the ear. The colours do their
utmost against the white. The smallest coloured rag glows out of doors. Picture
books lie in the snow; Chinese sell artfully made paper fans, and still more
frequently, paper kites in the form of exotic deep-sea fish'. See 'Moscow', p.180.
22
rectangular panes) wakes from its slumber to return his gaze.30

While Benjamin, writing about his experiments with hashish in
Marseille, describes how the pavement underfoot, and a fringe
blowing in the wind, shoot from his path and plunge him into
other times, different strangely familiar places.
1.1. The Aura, Contemplation and Distraction
In his 1935/36 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction', Benjamin charts a large-scale historical shift in the
organisation of human perception brought about by modern
industrialisation and the advent of new image reproduction
technologies. This shift - in the broadest of terms - is characterised
by the withering of contemplative (auratic) experience and the rise
of a distracted mode of perception. Benjamin argues that the
technical reproducibility of film and photography poses a serious
threat to the sense of uniqueness, autonomy and authenticity
which constitutes both the 'aura' of the work of art, and its
30 As Benjamin outlines in his 1929 essay 'The Image of Proust', it is this return of
the gaze that Proust sought so 'frenetically' in his study of resemblances; in the
light from a window, the chink of a spoon, the texture of a surface, the colour of a
room. See Walter Benjamin, 'The Image of Proust' in Illuminations., pp. 200-201.
For an interesting discussion of Benjamin's writings on Proust and Surrealism in
relation to his short work 'Passagen', see Max Pensky, 'Tactics of Remembrance:
Proust, Surrealism and the Origin of the Passagenwerk' in Walter Benjamin and
the Demands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1996) pp.164-189. Benjamin's discussion - in 'A Berlin Chronicle'- of a house
in the West-end that he had occupied as a child, and which had 'conserved in
seclusion the power to recognise [him]', is also fascinating in this regard. See 'A
Berlin Chronicle' in One Way Street, p.315.
23
entanglement with social privilege. For Benjamin, these qualities

form a kind of casing around the work of art; a barrier which
institutes a distance between the here and now of the spectator and
the time and space of the work of art. 'The essentially distant
object', he writes, 'is the unapproachable one ... The closeness
which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the
distance which it retains in its appearance'.31
Benjamin illustrates this sense of distance via a comparison

between the aura of historical objects and the aura of natural ones:
We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a

distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer
afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the
horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you
experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This
image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the
contemporary decay of the aura.32
If the aura starts to wither with the advent of modernity, then it is

not only because new image reproduction devices rob the work of
art of the qualities upon which its authority is historically
grounded, by both permitting - and virtually causing - mass
31 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', footnote 5, p.237.

32 Ibid. p.216.
24
distribution.33 It is also because in industrialised environments

there is little time and space for the 'masses' to engage in the kind
of contemplative relationship to their surroundings that
Benjamin outlines in the above example.
In contrast, he argues that film cultivates a distracted mode of

perception that is analogous to the mode of perception brought
about by big city environments.34 Through changes in framing,
montage, and techniques such as slow motion and close-up,
Benjamin argues that the film confronts the viewer with a series
of image fragments or shocks; the sensation of which is
comparable to what it's like to find oneself in the midst of an
unfamiliar city: Your eyes (and your body) oscillating between the
commotion of a crowd, the flash of an advertisement, the din of
the traffic, the pace of a truck.35
33 'This technique', Benjamin writes, 'enforces distribution because the production

of a film is so expensive that an individual who, for instance, might afford to buy
a painting no longer can afford to buy a film. In 1927 it was calculated that a major
film, in order to pay its way, had to reach an audience of nine million'. 'Work of
Art', footnote 7, p.237.
34 'The film', Benjamin writes, 'corresponds to profound changes in the
apperceptive apparatus - changes that are experienced on an individual scale by
the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day
citizen.' Benjamin, 'Work of Art', footnote 19, p.243.
35 In 'This Space for Rent', Benjamin writes: 'Today the most real, the mercantile
gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where
contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes with things such as a
car, growing to gigantic proportions careens at us out of a film screen'. Benjamin,
'One-Way Street', p.89.
25
While Benjamin's analysis of the shock effect of film (with its

formal emphasis on disruption and discontinuity) can - as a
number of critics have pointed out - be aligned with his analysis of
the spectatorial effects produced by the 'Epic Theatre',36 Benjamin's
analysis of the experiential effects of urban shock, and his
considerable references to film's capacity to open up the viewer to
the 'optical unconscious', clearly points to possibilities that are
imbricated with, but which extend beyond this comparison.
If we look closely at Benjamin's complex delineation of distraction,

we can begin to get a sense of the radical possibilities that he is
talking about. What is, at times, confusing about his argument is
that he employs 'distraction' (Zerstreuung) to refer to two
experientially very different modes of perception. While this dual
focus is rarely discussed in commentaries of his argument, as I
hope to point out, both (what on the surface may appear to be
antagonistic) aspects of his delineation of distraction are absolutely
critical to the radical possibilities of film that he is setting up.
36 For Benjamin's analysis of the shock-effect of 'Epic Theatre', see 'What is Epic
Theatre' in Illuminations, pp.149-150. 'Like the pictures in a film', Benjamin
writes, 'epic theatre moves in spurts'. 'Its basic form is that of the shock with
which the single, well-defined situations of the play collide. The songs, the
captions, the lifeless conventions set off one situation from another. This brings
about intervals which, if anything, impair the illusion of the audience and
paralyze its readiness for empathy. These intervals are reserved for the
spectators' critical reaction - to the actions of the players and to the way in which
they are presented'. p.149.
26
The first outline of distraction (which I have described above) is

introduced in the context of a discussion of film. 'The distracting
element of [film]', Benjamin writes, 'is primarily tactile, being
based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the
spectator.'37 As Benjamin, quoting Duhamel, writes: 'I can no
longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been
replaced by moving images.'38
The delineation of distraction that emerges from his second

example varies substantially. While the mode of perception that
he outlines, in this instance, also lacks the focus and concentration
that characterises the manner in which the contemplative viewer
engages with an artwork such as a painting, it is not defined by the
shock-like changes in space and focus which characterise his
description of the distracted mode of perception cultivated by
particular kinds of film, and the shock-effect of big city
environments. In contrast, Benjamin employs 'distraction', in this
instance, to refer to a mode of perception which is characterised
not by a proximity or sensitivity to stimuli, but by a distance from,
a kind of pulling back or spacing out from one's environment. He
writes: ' ... [T]he ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction
[be it walking to work or crossing the lights, opening a door or
driving a car] proves that their solution has become a matter of

38 Ibid. p.231.
27
habit'.39
Benjamin's example in 'The Work of Art' essay is architecture,

which like film (but unlike painting) creates the conditions for the
collective reception of a work of art.40 Unlike the 'attentive
concentration' that characterises the way that a traveller (Reisende)
engages with an architectural 'work of art',41 Benjamin argues that
the absentminded manner via which the distracted masses move
through a familiar building, for example, is built on the back of a
proximity to, a kind of appropriation of that environment. He
writes:
Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as

by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large
extent even optical reception ... This mode of appropriation ... in
certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which
face the human apparatus at the turning points of history cannot be
solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are
mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile
39 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.233. Margaret Morse, quoting David Brodsly's

discussion of habituated driving, argues that 'no aspect of the freeway experience
is more characteristic than the sudden realisation that you have no memory of the
past ten minutes of your trip'. See Margaret Morse, 'An Ontology of Everyday
Distraction - The Freeway, the Mall, and Television' in Logics of Television, ed.
Patricia Mellencamp, (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1990) p.203. The relationship between the absentminded perceptual state
produced by habit, and memory, will be discussed in detail in the second part of
this thesis.
40 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', pp. 228 and 223.
41 In 'Haussmann or the Barricades' Benjamin writes: 'The institutions of the
worldly and spiritual rule of the bourgeoisie, set in the frame of the boulevards,
were to find their apotheosis. Before their completion, boulevards were covered
over with tarpaulins, and unveiled like monuments'. Benjamin, 'Haussmann or the
Barricades' in Charles Baudelaire - A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
pp.173-174.
28
appropriation. 42
While I want to leave a detailed analysis of the experiential

promise of this 'appropriation' for the second part of this thesis, it
is important to make clear - from the outset - that there isn't
anything radical about this 'spacing out' in its own right. As I
pointed out in my discussion of 'This Space for Rent' in the
'Introduction', Benjamin makes it very clear that the radical stakes
of distraction (as it pertains to his discussion of film) are
contingent upon the spectator being hurtled with stimuli; leaving
them without the abstract, ritualistic distance from their everyday
environment that characterises the manner in which the
contemplative viewer engages with a traditional work of art.
This distinction, however, is complicated in the 'Work of Art'

essay by Benjamin's discussion of screen acting, and more
specifically, his analysis of the way that the audience of a film
identifies with what he describes as the 'critical', 'testing' capacities
of the camera.43 In this passage, Benjamin argues that the
audience's familiarity with the techniques through which the film
re-presents an actor (scene, or object) counteracts the sense of
42 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.233. We can see from this passage that Benjamin
attributes a significant weight to the tactile mode of appropriation that sustains
the habituated manner in which we come to engage with our environment. And
yet, as I have already pointed out, the only writer I have come across to explore
this aspect of Benjamin's work in any detail is Michael Taussig. See footnote 10 in
the 'Introduction' for details.
29
distance via which the traditional work of art is constituted as

auratic; an analysis which a number of critics have conflated with a
Brechtian concept of distanciation, which in turn is conflated with
the radical possibilities that Benjamin attributes to distraction.44
While it is one thing to acknowledge Brecht's influence on

Benjamin here,45 it is quite another to argue that the radical
possibilities that Benjamin associates with the distracted mode of
perception cultivated by film can be contained within a Brechtian
concept of distanciation. That is to say, while it is clear that
Benjamin's delineation of this critical, testing audience does owe a
great deal to Brecht' s analysis of the critical, reasoning 'observer'
produced by the Epic Theatre46, the critical distance that this
viewing practice institutes between the audience and the actor or
scene which they are 'testing', does not sit comfortably with the
44 See, for example, Hansen, 'Benjamin and Cinema', pp. 341-342.

45 See, for example, Brecht's discussion of the 'audience of the scientific age' in
his 1929 essay 'A Dialogue About Acting' in Brecht on Theatre:The Development
of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1990) pp.26-29.
46 In an interview with Bernard Guillemin, Brecht comments that the audience of
the epic theatre 'knows how to observe, and gets its enjoyment from setting its
reason to work'. See 'Conversation with Bert Brecht' in Brecht on Theatre', p.14.
See also 'The Epic Theatre and its Difficulties', where Brecht argues that 'the
essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings
than to the spectator's reason'. Brecht on Theatre, p.23. And in a table outlining
the characteristics of the Epic Theatre, in 'The Modern Theatre is the Epic
Theatre', Brecht lists 'turns the spectator into an observer', and 'the spectator
stands outside, studies' as defining characteristics of the audience produced by the
epic theatre. See Brecht an Theatre, p.37. For Benjamin's analysis of the
spectatorial effects of Epic Theatre, see 'What is Epic Theatre', p.149, and 'The
Author as Producer' in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books,
1986) pp. 235-236.
30
insistent, jerky, proximate spectatorial relationship that Benjamin

elsewhere attributes to the distracted mode of perception cultivated
by film.
Likewise, in terms of the relationship of distance that it establishes

between the spectator and his or her environment, Benjamin's
habit oriented delineation of distraction is close to (yet, as I will
argue, experientially very different from) the contemplative mode
of perception that he is criticising. I do not want to suggest
otherwise. What I do want to argue is that the tactile mode of
appropriation around which his understanding of habit is
organised (an appropriation that enables the urban masses - over a
period of time - to space out from their environment) plays an
absolutely integral part in his delineation of the radical possibilities
associated with the distracted mode of perception cultivated by
film.
If Benjamin's description of auratic experience (illustrated by his

image of the contemplative spectator gazing at a mountain range
on the horizon, or the contour of a branch) 'makes it easy to
comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura'
(the circumstances of which, Benjamin argues, are 'related to the
increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life')47 then
it is because the relationship that the masses have to their
47 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', pp. 216-217.

31
environment differs radically from the contemplative scenario

that Benjamin outlines in his example. If this relationship
(precipitated by the shock-like effects of urbanisation and industrial
modes of production) is characterised by a sense of distance, then it
is not of the same order as the critical distance around which
Benjamin's concept of 'testing' is organised, nor the distance which
the work of art (regardless of the sense of immediacy that its
subject matter may arouse) retains in its appearance. Rather the
kind of distance that I want to address here is a desensitised,
absentminded distance that grows, over a period of time, out of the
urban masses' ongoing exposure to the shocks pumped out by their
environment.48 This distance - which as I will point out, both
separates the masses off from, and lays the ground for the
possibility of aesthetic experience - sits alongside the 'desire of
contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and
humanly'; a desire, Benjamin writes, 'which is just as ardent as
their bent towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by
accepting its reproduction' ,49
While it is clear that the 'insistent, jerky, nearness'SO that

Benjamin associates with the shock-effect of film mediates the
48 The role that habit plays as a buffer against urban shock will be taken up in
detail in Part Two of this thesis.
49 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', pp. 216-217. The distinction that I am drawing here
between aesthetic and anaesthetized modes of experience will also be discussed in
much greater detail in the second part of this thesis.
32
distance instituted by the aura of the work of art, less clear is the
kind of radical effects that this proximate spectatorial relationship
could have on the automatic pilot produced by habit. I want to
argue that these radical effects are hooked up with another kind of
distance: Neither the auratic distance that separates the here and
now of the contemplative spectator from the time and space of the
work of art, nor the absentminded distance that Benjamin
associates with the automatic pilot produced by habit. Rather the
sense of distance that I want to address here is enmeshed with
what Miriam Hansen has described as 'the discontinuous return of
an auratic mode of experience through the backdoor of the optical
unconscious' ;51 a temporal return which I want to trace here via
the way in which film can resensitise the urban dweller, and
thereby foster a different spatio-temporal relationship to aspects of
his or her environment which have been appropriated by habit.
1.2. The Radical Possibilities of Film
'The history of every art form', Benjamin writes in the 'Work of

Art' essay, 'shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires
to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed
51 Miriam Hansen, 'Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the
Land of Technology"', New German Critique, # 40 (Winter, 1987) p. 212.
(Hereafter referred to as 'Benjamin, Cinema and Experience'.)
33
technical standard ... '.52 In both the 'Work of Art' essay and critical
accounts of Benjamin's now famous argument, this changed
technical standard is predominantly traced via the radically
different spectatorial effects cultivated by traditional works of art
(Benjamin's primary example is painting) and new image
reproduction devices such as film and photography.53
However, if we situate this passage within the time-frame in

which Benjamin is writing, it is possible to view his reference to 'a
changed technical standard' in a different manner. That is to say,
we can read this passage not as an affirmative statement about
changes to art that have already taken place with the advent of
new image reproduction technologies, but as a comment on the
ways in which the technical standards of film would have to
change before the radical 'effects' that he is talking about could
begin to take place. As Marcus Bullock, in 'The Rose of Babylon:
Walter Benjamin, Film Theory, and the Technology of Memory',
points out:
[The 'Work of Art' essay] was not written in 1920 or 1925, but in
1935. The German film industry was in the increasingly adept
hands of Josef Goebbels' ministry of propaganda, France had
52 Benjamin,' Work of Art', p.230.

53 My emphasis is on film because, as Benjamin himself points out, 'the
difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child's
play as compared to those raised by the film'. Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.220. I
will discuss the limitations of photography in this regard through a discussion of
Benjamin's interest in the photographs of Eugene Atget later on in this section. See
Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography' in One-Way Street, pp.240-257.
34
produced a masterpiece of reactionary mythopoeic aesthetics in

Abel Gance's Napoleon, and Hollywood was developing an
analgesic consumer product to draw a veil of dreams around the
reality of the Depression.54
While I want to leave a discussion of the phantasmagoric

spectatorial effects of Fascist propaganda until the second part of
this thesis, I want to draw attention here to the 'analgesic
consumer product' that Bullock is talking about. Because if we take
a quick detour via the 'technical standards' around which classical
narrative film is predominantly organised (continuity of time and
space, a sense of unity and closure, causal motivation organised
around characters) we can begin to get a sense of the kind of
changes to technical standards which would be required to produce
54 Marcus Bullock, 'The Rose of Babylon: Walter Benjamin, Film Theory and the
Technology of Memory', MLN, 103, 5 (1988) p.1100. (Hereafter referred to as 'The
Rose of Babylon'). Miriam Hansen proposes a similar argument in 'Benjamin,
Cinema and Experience'. She writes: '[W]hen Benjamin wrote his Artwork Essay,
the "all-out gamble of the historical process" (Kracauer) in which film and
photography were to play a decisive role seemed all but lost; instead of
advancing a revolutionary culture, the media of 'technical reproduction' were
lending themselves to oppressive social and political forces-first and foremost in
the fascist restoration of myth through mass spectacles and newsreels, but also in
the liberal-capitalist marketplace and in Stalinist cultural politics ... The
belated moment of the Artwork Essay only enhances the utopian modality of its
statements, shifting the emphasis from a definition of what film is to its failed
opportunities and unrealized promises'. p. 182. See also p. 217 of the same essay
for a brief discussion of the limitations of classical cinema in this regard, and
Taussig, 'Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds', p.26.
35
the radical effects that Benjamin is talking about.SS
These effects become more apparent when we situate Benjamin's

comments within the context of his discussion of the radical
strengths of Dadaism in which they transpire. As Benjamin
outlines in this passage, what interests him about the work
produced by the Dadaists is its total 'uselessness for contemplative
immersion' .56 While the Dadaists, as Bullock points out, start out
within 'the enclosed territory of art', their construction of still lifes
out of cigarette butts, train tickets, buttons, and spools of cotton,
'break down the dividing barrier separating [art] from the material
existence of reality' .57
In the 'Work of Art' essay, Benjamin's concern with the perceptual

ramifications of artistic autonomy (and its abstract, distant
relationship to the chaos that characterises the modern everyday)
is predominantly played out in his criticism of painting which, to
borrow Bullocks's phrase, 'does not look out with a straight gaze
on the disorder of true conditions, but only through the restrictive
55 Concerning the role that characters play in the film practice for which he
argues, Benjamin quotes Brecht from his 1931 essay 'The Film, the Novel and Epic
Theatre': 'The film ... provides - or could provide - useful insight into the details
of human actions ... Character is never used as a source of motivation; the inner
life of the persons never supplies the principal cause of the plot and seldom is its
main result.' 'Work of Art', footnote 10, p.239. See Brecht, 'The Film, the Novel
and Epic Theatre' in Brecht on Theatre, p.48.
57 Bullock, 'The Rose of Babylon', p.1108. Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.231. See also
Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer', p.229.
36
filter of what may be admitted into the consistent, harmonious

order of artistic construction' .ss And yet what is frustrating about
Benjamin's formulation is that the line he draws between the
autonomy of painting and the shock-like fragmentation of film
does, on the surface, seem to preclude a discussion as to the
spectatorial ramifications that might result from continuity in
film; effects which not only complicate the
contemplation/ distraction divide, but which share a certain
common ground with the distant, spaced out relationship that the
automatic pilot produced by habit has to her or his environment.
The closest that Benjamin does come to discussing the perceptual

ramifications of filmic continuity is in the relationship he draws
between the captions which accompany pictures in magazines, and
the increasingly 'obligatory' way that filmic fragments are pieced
together through the process of editing. He writes:
The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures

in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more
imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture
58 Bullock, 'The Rose of Babylon', p.1108. Bullock is referring, more specifically,

to 'the inner coherence which we prize most highly in our established aesthetics'.
37
appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.59
What is significant about this passage is that it establishes

Benjamin's concern with the way that the shock-like organisation
and sensation of film can be de-shocked when the autonomy of
each fragment is subordinated to a cog driving a larger narrative; a
process which culminates with continuity editing in classical
narrative film, for example, where filmic 'pictures' are shot and cut
together to draw us in, and move us through the world of a
narrative. Within this context, it is much more likely that the
audience's familiarity with the techniques through which the film
represents its object, would result not in a 'critical', 'testing'
audience, but rather an audience whose familiarity with classical
techniques would enable them to space out and lose themselves in
the world of the narrative.
Clearly, this is neither the kind of film - nor the distracted mode of
perception cultivated by film - that Benjamin deems radical. As I
wanted to make clear from the outset through my delineation of
59 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p220. Kracauer - writing ten years earlier - is much
more explicit in this regard. In 'Cult of Distraction', Kracauer argues that the
programs of the large movie theatres 'rob distraction of its meaning by
amalgamating the wide range of effects - which by their nature demand to be
isolated from one another - into an 'artistic' unity'. 'Distraction - which is
meaningful only as improvisation, as a reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of
the world - is festooned with drapery and forced back into a unity that no longer
exists. Rather than acknowledging the actual state of disintegration that such
shows ought to represent, the movie theatres glue the pieces back together after
the fact and present them as organic creations'. Kracauer, 'Cult of Distraction' in
The Mass Ornament - Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995) pp.327-328.
38
his experiments with hashish, the film practice for which

Benjamin argues would not seek to entice the audience to
immerse themselves in a realm apart from their environment.
Rather, as a quick run through his choice of terms ('interruption',
'assault', 'shock', 'sudden change', 'bursting', 'rupture',
'destructive', 'cathartic'60) makes clear, the film practice for which
Benjamin argues would - by means of its technical structure - take
'the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism
had ... kept it inside the moral shock effect',61 and blow the
technical standards which maintain this spectatorial relationship
apart: A kind of technical catharsis which - in a similar vein to
Benjamin's experiments with hashish - would open up the
spectator to the possibility of a radical remembrance of their
environment. 62
1.3. The Face of the City
The photographs of Eugene Atget ('an actor who, disgusted with

the profession, wiped off the mask and then set about removing
the make-up from reality too'63) serve as a primitive example of an
imaging practice which, according to Benjamin, does not invite the
60 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', pp. 215, 230-231.

61 Ibid. p.232.
62 See Bullock, 'The Rose of Babylon', p.1111.
63 Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography', p.241.
39
spectator to immerse him or herself in a realm apart from his or

her environment, but which wears down the threshold separating
art from reality.64 What fascinates Benjamin about Atget's
photographs (shot like 'scenes of a crime' in Paris around 1900 65) is
their absence of the human countenance, and its replacement by a
series of commonplace milieus and landscapes (the entrance to a
building, the facade of a house, an empty street, a cobblestone
courtyard), each of which, Benjamin argues, has been emancipated
from the aura by Atget's presentation of each scene at 'face value'.66
Of course, the kind of value that Benjamin is referring to here

differs radically from the value invested in the camera's capacity to
capture the human countenance at a particular point in time (and
its concomitant revival of the aura at the moment of its decline).
In the 'Work of Art' essay, he writes:
It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early

photography. The cult value of remembrance of loved ones, absent
or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For
the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the
fleeting expression of a human face.67
64 Benjamin argues that Atget's photographs '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'. 'Work of Art', p.220.
66 Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography', p. 251.
40
In contrast to the cult value of the portrait (which institutes an

auratic distance between the spectator and the photograph)
Benjamin argues that Surrealist photography, and more
specifically, Atget's capacity to capture the 'anonymous
physiognomy' of commonplace milieus which are ordinarily
traversed absently, 'sets the scene for a salutory estrangement
between man and his surroundings'.68
Again, the mode of estrangement that Benjamin is talking about

here is hooked up with the dialectics of distance and proximity
upon which his fascination with the effects of hashish is grounded.
The camera, in this instance, performs a similar function to
hashish, because it opens up the spectator to aspects of his or her
environment that are ordinarily traversed absently; a function
which Benjamin describes - both in 'A Small History of
Photography' and the 'Work of Art' essay - in terms of the camera's
capacity to open up the viewer to the optical unconscious. 69 In his
1931 essay, 'A Small History of Photography', he writes:
It is through photography that we first discover the existence of

this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual
unconscious through psychoanalysis. Details of structure, cellular
tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally
concerned - all this is in its origins more native to the camera than
the atmospheric landscape of the soulful portrait. Yet at the same
68 Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography', p. 251.

69 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.230, and 'A Small History of Photography', pp.243-
244.
41
time photography reveals in this material the physiognomic

aspects of visual worlds which dwell in the smallest things,
meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking
dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the
difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly
historical variable. 70
And in the 'Work of Art' essay, he writes:
Since [Sigmund Freud's] Psychopathology of Everyday Life things

have changed. This book isolated and made analysable things
which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream
of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also
acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar
deepening of apperception. 71
If we cut back to Atget' s photographs (of empty streets and vacant

courtyards) we can begin to get a sense of the way that the camera's
merging of technology and magic relates to the mode of
estrangement that Benjamin is talking about. For Benjamin, the
spectatorial relationship to commonplace milieus cultivated by an
encounter with Atget's photographs is salutory because - like
Proust's encounter with the image of his bedroom 'distorted' by a
magic lantern - Atget's technical re-presentation of commonplace
milieus at 'face value' (that is, outside the visual aegis instituted by
habit) can estrange the viewer from his or her surroundings and
70 Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography', pp. 243-244. For a discussion of

similar currents in the work of Bela Balazs, see Gertrud Koch, 'Bela Balazs: The
Physiognomy of Things', trans. Miriam Hansen, New German Critique, # 40
(Winter 1987) pp.167-178.
42
resituate him/her in a position whereby aspects of those

surroundings (which had 'heretofore floated along unnoticed in
the broad stream of perception') can encounter him/her with their
glance.72
If we turn to Benjamin's 1939 essay 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire',

we can begin to get a sense, not only of the way in which this idea
of a reciprocal glance hooks up with his delineation of the optical
unconscious opened up by the camera, but also the way that it
complicates the decline of the aura that he charts in 'The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. Three years later in
'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', he writes:
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with

the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to
the data of the memoire involontaire. (These data, incidentally,
are unique; they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them.
Thus they lend support to a concept of the aura that comprises the
'unique manifestation of a distance' ..?3
In contrast to the aura of the traditional work of art (which

institutes a distance between the here and now of the
contemplative spectator and the time and space of the work of art)
72 Ibid. p.229.
73 Benjamin, 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p.148. In the final line, Benjamin is
quoting himself from the 'Work of Art' essay, p.216. For an interesting discussion
of Benjamin's ambivalence over the decline of the aura and its relationship to
involuntary memory, see Jodi Brooks, 'Between Contemplation and Distraction:
Cinema, Obsession and Involuntary Memory' in Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and
Cinema for the Moment , ed. Laleen Jayamanne (Sydney: Power Publications,
1995). pp.77-90.
43
the temporality that Benjamin ascribes to the aura in this passage

'comprises the unique manifestation of a distance' because he
invests it with a 'mnemonotechnical', redemptive capacity.74 That
is to say, while new image reproduction devices rob the traditional
work of art of the qualities (uniqueness, autonomy, singularity in
time and space) upon which the authority of its aura is grounded,
for Benjamin the more radical potential of these technologies lies
in their capacity to open up the masses to the optical unconscious;
a capacity which ushers in a more radical mode of auratic
experience through which the urban masses' newfound proximity
to aspects of their environment which are ordinarily traversed
absently, can ignite in them traces of places and moments which
have been appropriated by habit.
However, if Atget's photographs (despite their re-presentation of

commonplace milieus at 'face value') fall short - or at least shorter
than film - in their capacity to create the conditions for this
dialectical glance, then it is because the photograph is structurally
limited in its capacity to disrupt the contemplative spectatorial
relationship that Benjamin - in 'This Space for Rent' and 'The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' -
74 Hansen uses this term in 'Benjamin and Cinema', p.341.

44
disparages.75 As I have already pointed out, film takes us further

down the track because of its shock-like organisation (and
sensation) out of a series of image fragments. And yet the radical
possibilities that Benjamin is talking about only hold - as both
Hansen and Bullock have pointed out - if film rejects both the
ambition to prolong the bourgeois cult of art, and the technical
standards around which classical narrative film is predominantly
organised.76 In contrast, the film practice for which Benjamin
argues would seek to dynamite those standards apart, and re-orient
the camera's capacity to capture commonplace milieus at 'face
value' towards that practice of 'estrangement' that Benjamin, too
optimistically perhaps, ascribes to Atget's photographs.
If we cut to the face of the city that emerges from Ruttman's Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City - the commotion at an intersection, a
man selling papers, a close-up of train tracks, leaves on the
pavement, crossing the road, a shoe store display, a curtain in the
breeze, overhead cables, smoke from a factory, light on the
pavement - we can begin to get a sense of the way that its shock-
like organisation out of a series of image fragments cultivates a
75 Marcus Bullock, for example, argues that Atget's pictures have been admired by
generations for reasons quite different to those outlined by Benjamin. 'They are,
after all', Bullock writes, 'filled with the tranquil serenity of a world before the
business day is remembered. They offer images of refuge and solitude to a public
besieged on those same streets in life by rush, bustle, traffic and noise'. 'The Rose
of Babylon', p.1108.
76 See Hansen, 'Benjamin, Cinema and Experience', pp. 204 - 210, and Bullock,
'The Rose of Babylon', p.1108.
45
spectatorial relationship that is radically different to both

contemplative spectatorship, and the film spectator cultivated by
the technical standards around which classical narrative film is
based.77
With its close-ups of drainpipes, a low flying plane, a boy on a bike

- reflected in the pavement, the facade of a building, the glean of a
railing, the view from a tram - distorted by rain, Joris Ivens' Rain,
like Berlin:Symphony of a Great City, both mediates the distance
instituted between the time and space of the traditional work of art
and the here and now of the spectator, and blows apart the
conditions within which the world of the film could be
experienced as a realm of escape.78
77 This sense of discontinuity is compromised visually at a couple of points in the

film when Ruttman draws a connection between a movement or action presented in
two or more fragments. For example, an image of a man eating at a cafe is followed
by an image of a hungry lion, a child eating, and a camel suckling its calf. In
another instance, a close-up of human legs walking through a train station is
followed by a close-up of a herd of cow's legs crossing a street.
78 In his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the
German Film, Siegfried Kracauer is critical of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
for the same reasons that I am interested in it here. He argues that 'Berlin
inaugurated the vogue of cross-section, or "montage" films ... which offered a
gratifying opportunity of showing much and revealing nothing'. In contrast to my
analysis of the possibilities associated with Berlin's shock-like configuration of
commonplace milieus, Kracauer favours a film practice that instead of 'record[ing]
thousands of details without connecting them', would employ characters to
'penetrat[e] [such] immense subject-matter with a true understanding of its social,
economic and political structure'. See From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological
History of the German Film (The United States of America: Princeton University
Press, 1974) pp.187-188.
46
It is important to note however, that I am referring here to the

spectatorial relationship cultivated by the visual dimensions of the
film only. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City was actually the first
German feature film to have a complete orchestral score composed
for it. While legal reasons have, for a number of years, prohibited
the score (written by Edmund Meisel) from being presented with
the film, taking a cue from the film's title, I imagine that it would
compromise the sense of discontinuity that I have been describing
here. Viewed without the score, the spectatorial relationship
cultivated by the image fragments which constitute Berlin can be
aligned, not with the audience's experience of a symphony, but
rather - as per Benjamin's description of his relationship to his
surroundings after he has taken hashish - the tuning of the
instruments before the symphony begins.79
My point however is that the close, tactile spectatorial relationship

cultivated by a film like Berlin or Rain begins but does not end
with the end of the film, but actually transforms the way that the
audience subsequently engages with urban environments to which
they have become habituated, by opening them up to aspects of
commonplace milieus which are ordinarily traversed in a
desensitised, absentminded state.
79 See 'Hashish, Beginning of March 1930' in Selected Writings, Volume 2, p.329.

In contrast to Berlin, Rain was produced in 1929 as a silent film. Lou Lichtveld and
Hanns Eisler (in 1931 and 1941 respectively) each wrote a score for the film.
While these scores are rarely heard alongside Rain, Eisler's score 'Fourteen Ways
to Describe Rain' can be found in Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing For
the Films (London and Atlantic Highlands: The Athlone Press, 1994) pp.158-165.
47
In 'Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street', Miriam Hansen

argues that the radical possibilities of the extension of the optical
unconscious to the spectating collective (born of the audience's
identification with the camera) hinges upon the psychoanalytically
inflected temporality of the optical unconscious encountering the
collectivity with its glance. 'Only then', Hansen argues, 'would the
technically enabled extension and decentering of the sensorium (at
the level of the filmic text) translate into an imaginative,
empowering incorporation of the apparatus on the part of the
audience' .so Hansen argues, however, that these possibilities are
cut short when Benjamin submerges the radical possibilities of
collective reception under a notion of distraction oriented around
a Brechtian attitude of critical testing.81
Amongst her examples, Hansen cites the analogy that Benjamin

draws in the 'Work of Art' essay between the camera operator and
the surgeon, to support her claim that Benjamin conflates the
radical possibilities of distraction with the spectatorial effects of
distanciation. She argues that, amongst other things, what drops
out of this concept in the process, is the sensory-somatic
immediacy that Benjamin elsewhere attributes to the distracted
mode of perception cultivated by film. As I will discuss in the
second part of this thesis, the analogy that Benjamin draws
80 Hansen, 'Benjamin and Cinema', p.340.

81 Ibid. p.340.
48
between the camera operator and the surgeon - a figure who slices
into the tissue of reality, and feels his or her way around the
organs of the viewer - would certainly seem to counteract the
critical, distant spectatorial relationship born of the spectator's
identification with the camera that Hansen is describing here.
However, while Benjamin does (in his discussion of screen

acting82) align the audience with the kind of detached, critical,
testing capacities that Hansen is referring to here, towards the end
of the essay he aligns the collectivity with a different notion of
distraction (the tasks of which are 'accomplished not so much by
attention as by habit').83 As I have attempted to point out, the
experiential possibilities that Benjamin associates with habit are
not insignificant: 'For the tasks which face the human apparatus at
the turning points of history', he writes, 'cannot be solved by
optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered
gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation' .84
While this outline of distraction does differ from the distracted

mode of perception that Benjamin associates with the shock-effect
of film and the hubbub of big city environments, my point is that
his habit oriented delineation of distraction (and crucially, the
mode of appropriation upon which it is grounded) provides the
82 See my discussion of this passage on pp. 28 -30.

84 Ibid. p.233.
49
experiential ground for the kind of radical mnemonotechnical

possibilities that Hansen is talking about. However, in contrast to
Hansen's argument, for the audience's incorporation of the
camera's capacity to open up the optical unconscious to be deemed
radical, it would not remain tied to the audience's engagement
with a filmic text, but - in a similar vein to Benjamin's
experiments with hashish - would open up the audience to aspects
of their environment which are ordinarily traversed in a
desensitised, absentminded manner.
If we fail to recognise Benjamin's variegated (what at times may

appear to be internally discordant) delineation of distraction, then
the radical possibilities that he attributes to the distracted mode of
perception cultivated by film, can be boiled down to the Brechtian
attitude of critical testing that Hansen is talking about: A critical
practice that breaks down the distance via which a work of art is
constituted as auratic, but which does little to alleviate the
impoverishment of experience brought about by urbanisation, and
little to quell the 'desire of contemporary masses' to 'bring things
'closer' spatially and humanly' that Benjamin describes. 85
As I have attempted to point out in the course of the first part of

this thesis, the storehouse of appropriated material that sustains
the distracted, automated collective produced by habit is the

50
ground from which Benjamin's faith in the magical,

mnemonotechnical possibilities of the distracted mode of
perception cultivated by certain kinds of film can be deemed
radical.
51
Part2
Searing the Subject:

Urban Shock and Aesthetic Experience
Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an

object at very close range by way of its likeness, its
reproduction.
Walter Benjamin,
'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'.l
Benjamin's analysis of the demise of auratic experience hinges

partly on the way that new imaging devices rob the work of art of
the qualities upon which its authority is grounded, and partly on
the manner in which the shock effect of urban environments
excludes the masses from the kind of contemplative relationship
to their surroundings that Benjamin describes in his image of the
contemplative spectator gazing at a mountain range on the
horizon, or the contour of a branch. If, as I argued in the first part
of this thesis, the relationship that the masses have to their
environment is characterised by a sense of distance, then this
distance is not of the same order as the auratic distance that
separates the here and now of the spectator from the time and

52
space of the work of art, but a desensitised, absentminded distance

that grows out of the habituated manner in which the urban
masses come to engage with their environment.
What I want to do in the second part of this thesis is to examine

the experiential effects of this absentminded state in more detail.
Drawing closely on Benjamin's analysis - in his 1939 essay 'Some
Motifs in Baudelaire' - of the atrophy of experience brought about
by urban shock, I want to explore the ways in which the
desensitised, absentminded state produced by habit both
perpetuates this denigration of experience, and bears the traces
through which it can be countered.
2.1. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics
In 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay

Reconsidered', Susan Buck-Morss traces the role reversal
undergone by the synaesthetic system with the advent of
modernity: From a cognitive faculty which synthesises perception
in the present with sense memories and bodily sensation, to an
anaesthetic which numbs the body from excess energies pumped
out by the modern everyday.2 Alongside this transformation she
2 Susan Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork

Essay Reconsidered', October, 62 (Fall, 1992). (Hereafter referred to as 'Aesthetics
and Anaesthetics'.)
53
describes the no less radical reversal in the meaning of the category

'aesthetics.' Drawing on Terry Eagleton's critical history of the
term, Buck-Morss traces its etymological roots to Aisthitikos; the
ancient Greek word for that which is perceptive by feeling. The
original field of aesthetics, Eagleton writes, 'is nothing less than the
whole of our sensate life together - the business of affections and
aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory
surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all
that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the
world.'3 For Buck-Morss, how and why the aesthetic moves away -
via the course of the modem era - from connoting this close, tactile
experience of the everyday, to invoking the realm of 'art' with
which it is and was - both now and in Benjamin's time -
predominantly associated, is far from self evident. While she
refrains from charting a causal or parallel history between this shift
and the transformation of the synaesthetic system with modernity,
she draws them into a constellation so that the transformation of
the aesthetic can illuminate - and be illuminated by - the
synaesthetic system's modern reorganisation as an anaesthetic
from the everyday.
This constellation has a significant bearing on the 'Work of Art'

essay, and more specifically, on Benjamin's concern with the role
that new imaging technologies could play in alleviating (rather
3 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) p.13.
54
than perpetuating) the impoverishment of experience brought

about by this decline in our capacity to integrate perception with
sense memories and bodily sensation. For Benjamin, this rapidly
diminishing capacity is the product of the urban dweller's constant
bombardment by a series of shocks (on the street, at the station, in
the arcade), the experiential effects of which need to be traced in
significantly more detail before we can begin to get a sense of the
radical experiential promise of this absentminded perceptual state.
While Benjamin's delineation of the experiential effects of urban

shock (in the 'Work of Art' essay, and more significantly, 'Some
Motifs in Baudelaire') draws largely on Freud's analysis of shock in
'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (written in 1920), Georg Simmel's
essay 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' is equally important here.
Written in 1903, Simmel's study is the earliest example of an essay
which attempts to come to grips with the experiential effects that
result from the urban masses' ongoing exposure to the shocks
pumped out by their environment. 4 While Benjamin only refers
to Simmel fleetingly in 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire' ,s certain key
4 Georg Simmel, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' in Simmel on Culture - Selected
Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London, Thousand Oaks, New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997) pp.174 - 185. For a brief discussion of Benjamin's
relationship to Simmel, see Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography,
ed. Martina Dervis, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers (London and New
York: Verso, 1997) pp. 46 -47. For an interesting discussion of the perceptual and
experiential effects brought about by modem industrialisation, and railroad
travel in particular, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and
Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1979). (Hereafter referred to as 'The Railway Journey'.)
5 Benjamin, 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p.151.
55
aspects of Benjamin's discussion of the experiential effects of urban

shock hook up with those outlined in Simmel's essay, which was
written more than thirty years earlier.
In 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', Simmel argues that the

'psychological basis' of the 'metropolitan type' hinges upon 'the
intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the
swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli'.6 He
argues that the 'sharp discontinuity' and 'unexpectedness' of
'onrushing impressions' that characterise big city environments
create 'psychological conditions' which differ radically from the
'sensory foundations' cultivated by small town and rural life.7 The
crucial difference, Simmel argues, is that the latter have their basis
in the 'unconscious layers of the psyche', in contrast to the
'transparent, conscious, higher layers' that constitute the locus for
the psychological conditions cultivated by metropolitan life.8
For Simmel, the ground for this distinction lies in the radically
different perceptual demands placed on those who live in urban
and rural environments. He argues that small town and rural
environments (which produce comparatively low levels of
stimuli) cultivate a perceptual relationship that is characterised by
a 'slow' and 'even' engagement with one's environment. These
6 Simrnel, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', p.175.

7 Ibid. p.175.
8 Ibid. p.175.
56
environments cultivate a relationship to stimuli that is more

'deeply felt' than the sharp, discontinuous manner in which the
urban dweller relates to her or his environment, because it is a
relationship that 'grow[s] most readily in the rhythm of
uninterrupted habituations' which make their home in the
'unconscious layers of the psyche'.9 'Lasting impressions', Simmel
writes, 'impressions which differ only slightly from one another,
impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show
regular and habitual contrasts ... use up, so to speak, less
consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images'
that characterises modern urban environments.10
In contrast, he argues that the big city dweller uses up more

consciousness because their reaction to stimuli is the responsibility
of the 'intellect'; 'that organ which is least sensitive and quite
remote from the depth of the personality' and which serves to
'preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of
metropolitan life'.1 1 However, Simmel argues that when faced
with a constant bombardment with stimuli, the intellect loses its

capacity to respond with the amount of energy required. While
this loss does not pose any real threat to the urban dweller, he
argues that the 'agitation of the nerves ... for such a long time that
they finally cease to react at all', results in the desensitised, 'blase'
9 Ibid. p.175.
10 Ibid. p175.
1l Ibid. p.176.
57
manner in which the 'metropolitan type' relates to her or his

environment.12 He writes:
[...T]hrough the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes,

... harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the
nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of
strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they
have no time to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges
to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This
constitutes that blase attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan
child shows when compared with children of quieter and less
changeable milieus.13
For Simmel, the impact that this 'blase' attitude has on the manner
in which the 'metropolitan type' engages with his or her
environment, is manifested most visibly in the way that he or she
operates amidst the hustle and bustle of a big city crowd; where the
'bodily proximity and narrowness of space' makes his or her
mental distance from, and insensitivity to stimuli, all the more
12 Ibid. p.178.
13 Ibid. p.178.
58
astounding.14
If we cut to Benjamin's discussion of the experiential effects of

urban shock in 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', a number of
similarities between Simmel's ideas and Freud's analysis in
'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (from which Benjamin's ideas are
largely drawn) become apparent. While Freud's essay is concerned
primarily with mechanically induced traumas associated with
railway accidents and war, Benjamin applies his hypotheses to the
atrophy of experience associated with 'the inhospitable, blinding
age of big-scale industrialism' ,15 where shock experience is not the
exception but 'the norm' .16
14 Ibid.p.181. It is important to note however that for Simmel, the urban dweller's
incapacity - when faced with a constant bombardment by shock - to respond to
stimuli with the amount of energy required, is not the sole catalyst for the
desensitised, blase manner that he is talking about. Rather he argues that this
'physiological source' produces an effect akin to the kind of blase attitude
produced by another source; that is, the internalisation of the money economy that
dominates metropolitan life. The essence of this blase attitude, Simmel writes,
consists in 'the blunting of discrimination'. '[Objects] appear to the blase person in
an evenly flat and grey tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. This
mood is the faithful subjective reflection of the completely internalised money
economy. By being the equivalent to all the manifold things in one and the same
way, money becomes the most frightful leveller.' p.178. For a more comprehensive
analysis of the relationship between the money economy and the blase attitude,
see pp.176-179. Simmel's analysis of the blase attitude, in this respect, as the
preserve of a particular class, clearly differentiates it from the more involuntary,
physiologically attuned 'blase manner' that is relevant to my discussion here. For
an interesting re-reading of this blase attitude in terms of its relationship to a
post-shock economy of 'boredom', see Patrice Petro, 'After Shock/Between
Boredom and History' in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video , ed.
Patrice Petro (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995)
pp.265-284.
16 Ibid. p.116.
59
The 'fruitfulness' of Freud's hypotheses for Benjamin's theory of

experience hinges upon Freud's analysis of the role that
consciousness plays as a protective shield against shock.17 Freud
argues that consciousness (a faculty which bears a striking
resemblance to Simmel's delineation of the 'intellect') wards off
excess energies by deflecting them from the realm in which they
could leave behind an imprint in memory. He writes: "[B]ecoming
conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processes
incompatible with each other within one and the same system'.
Rather memory fragments are often most powerful and most
enduring when the incident which left them behind was one that
never entered consciousness."18 The more efficiently
consciousness registers and thereby deflects these energies, the

more effectively the subject is sealed off from (the possibility of)
experience.
For Benjamin, experience here splits into two kinds; each of which
bears its own distinct temporality. He argues that the more
consciousness is invoked as a defence against stimuli, the less
likely are these impressions to enter into experience (Erfahrung),
remaining instead in the sphere of a particular moment in one's
17 In 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', Freud describes consciousness as a kind of

bodily surface: 'It must lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be
turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems'.
p. 295. Once it has been 'baked through' with stimuli, this surface forms a kind of
'crust' which is incapable of any further modification. See pp. 297-298.
18 Quoted by Benjamin in' Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p.114.
60
life (Erlebnis). He writes:
Perhaps the special achievement of shock defence may be seen in

its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in
consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents. This
would be a peak achievement of the intellect; it would tum the
incident into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis). l9
While the material that constitutes our conscious memory

(Erlebnis) may be recalled voluntarily, Benjamin argues that
Erlebnis only becomes experience when perception in the present
hooks up involuntarily with sense memories from the past. As
Proust - reeling from the taste of the past conjured by his
madeleine - writes in Remembrance of Things Past: Experience is
'somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably
present in some material object (or in the sensation which such an
object arouses in us) though we have no idea which one it is. As
for that object, it depends entirely on chance whether we come
upon it before we die ... '.20

20 Benjamin quoting Proust in 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p. 112. See also Max
Pensky's 'Tactics of Remembrance'. 'The medium for this association', Pensky
writes, 'is a tactile sensation of an object that otherwise would have remained
insignificant or overlooked; the feel of a starched napkin, the taste of a
madeleine, the contour of a curved paving stone against the foot, the sound of a
spoon ringing on a plate. Such tactile occurrences, Proust maintains, are themselves
fortuitous. Just this accidental quality guarantees their authenticity; for what
was unwilled is above suspicion of being a mere product of intellectual volition'.
p.174.
61
Far from being satisfied with chance as an adequate basis for

experience, as I discussed in the first part of this thesis, Benjamin is
interested in the way that the camera's capacity to capture
unconscious optics can open up the spectator to aspects of
moments and places which are ordinarily engaged with in a
desensitised, absentminded state. However, while a number of
critics have pointed in the direction of such an encounter in their
reading of Benjamin's analysis of film's capacity to alleviate the
atrophy of experience brought about by urbanisation, less attention
has been devoted to the way that Benjamin's Freudian analysis of
shock actually seals the big city dweller off from the possibility of
such an encounter.
That is to say, Benjamin's analysis of the role that consciousness

plays as a protective shield against urban shock hinges on the
manner in which consciousness is constantly invoked to deflect
stimuli from the realm in which they could leave behind an
imprint in memory. 'Becoming conscious and leaving behind a
memory trace', he writes, 'are processes incompatible within one
and the same system', which put in Proustian terms, 'means that
only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously,
what has not happened to the subject as an experience, can become
a component of the memoire involontaire. '21 My point is that
21 Benjamin, 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p.114. In the same passage, Benjamin

comments that 'according to Freud, the attribution of 'permanent traces as the
basis of memory' to processes of stimulation is reserved for 'other systems', which
must be thought of as different from consciousness'. p.114.
62
without this experiential ground, the radical mnemonotechnical

powers of the unconscious optics opened up by the camera (that is,
their capacity to serve as an mnemonic trigger for aspects of urban
environments which have not been experienced in a conscious
state) cannot unproblematically be said to alleviate the atrophy of
experience brought about by urbanisation.
Before addressing this point in more detail, I want to cut back to

Buck-Morss' essay, and to her discussion of the role that new
imaging technologies have played - and continue to play - in
perpetuating (rather than alleviating) the atrophy of experience
brought about by the synaesthetic system's modem reorganisation
as an anaesthetic from the everyday. She argues that while the
body's self-anaesthetising defences are largely involuntary, towards
the end of the nineteenth century an 'elaborate technics' developed
to anaesthetise the masses from reality.22 For Buck-Morss, the key
word for this development is 'phantasmagoria'; a term which
originated in England in 1802 as the title of an exhibition of optical
illusions produced by a series of magic lanterns, and which has
since come to denote an appearance of reality that tricks the senses
through synaesthetic manipulation.23
22 Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics', p.18.

23 Ibid. p22. For a detailed account of the historical origms of the
phantasmagoria, see Margaret Cohen, 'Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria', New
German Critique # 48 (Fall, 1989) pp. 87 - 107.
63
Included in Buck-Morss' list of phantasmagoric spectacles are a

number of examples outlined by Benjamin in 'Paris - the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century': The glass covered, marble floored
Parisian shopping arcades which provided the casing for a
phantasmagoria of commodities on display; the dioramas and
panoramas that immersed the spectator in a magical landscape; the
bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century, the furnishings of
which provided a phantasmagoria of textures and sensations; and
the World Fairs where, Benjamin argues, 'the phantasmagoria of
commodity culture attained its most radiant unfurling' .24
While Buck-Morss argues that the perceptions and sensations

provided by these, and other more contemporary forms of
phantasmagoric entertainment (such as the shopping centres,
video arcades, theme parks and movie blockbusters we have today)
are 'real' in the sense that 'their impact upon the senses and nerves
is still "natural" from a neurophysical point of view', she argues
that 'their social function is in each case compensatory'; a mode of
compensation that - by virtue of the manner in which each
practice bombards the body with sensation - perpetuates the
24 See Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics', p.22, and Benjamin 'Paris - the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century' in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the
Era of High Capitalism, pp. 157-160, 167-169, 161-163, and 164-166 respectively.
Buck-Morss runs through a number of fascinating examples, including the figure of
the Flaneur, whom she argues is 'self-trained' in the practice of distancing
himself from reality by turning it into a phantasmagoria. p. 24. Her brief
discussion of 'Mood Paintings' (Stimmungsbild) - a genre of painting in fashion at
the turn of the century which attempted to depict a mood rather than a subject - is
also fascinating in this regard. See pp. 23-24. See also Simmel's discussion of 'The
Berlin Trade Exhibition' in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, pp.255-258.
64
atrophy of experience which it promises to alleviate. She writes:
The goal is manipulation of the synaesthetic system by control of

environmental stimuli. It has the effect of anaesthetising the
organism, not through numbing, but through flooding the senses.
These simulated sensoria alter consciousness, much like a drug,
but they do so through sensory distraction rather than chemical
alteration, and - most significantly - their effects are
experienced collectively rather than individually.25
Benjamin draws our attention to the anaesthetising spectatorial

effects of phantasmagoric display in the 'Epilogue' to the 'Work of
Art' essay, where he significantly tempers his faith in the radical
possibilities that he attributed to new imaging technologies
throughout the course of the essay, via a discussion of Fascism's
deployment of the camera for the aestheticization of politics and
war. Quoting Marinetti's 'Futurist Manifesto', Benjamin writes:
For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the

branding of war as antiaesthetic ... Accordingly we state: ... War
is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of
the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering
meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful
because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire,
the scents, and the stench of putrefacation into a symphony. War
is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the
big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals
from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of
Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so
that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ...
25 Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics', pp.22-23.

65
may be illumined by them.26
For Benjamin, the 'aesthetic' here takes on a highly adverse

function. Rather like the anaesthetising function performed by
television news, the aesthetic's etymological promise (like the
news' commitment to keeping you 'in touch') becomes a
phantasmagoric shield; distancing us from reality to such a degree
that we are able to 'experience [our] own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure'. 27
The sense of immediacy to the image cultivated by phantasmagoric

display (and its concomitant anaesthetisation of the spectator to the
contents of that display) can be demonstrated through the way that
the city is aestheticised in Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi.
Described - I would argue somewhat erroneously - by a number of
critics as a city film in the tradition of Ruttman's Berlin:
26 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', pp.234-235.

27 lbid.p.235. As Benjamin writes in 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', the replacement
of older forms of narration with 'information by sensation' reflects the modem
dweller's inability to 'assimilate the data of the world around him by way of
experience'. 'Newspapers', he argues, 'constitute one of the many evidences of such
an inability. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate
the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its
purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate what
happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader'.
Benjamin, 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p.112 -113. For an interesting discussion of
these debates in the context of television spectatorship, see Samuel Weber, Mass
Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power
Publications, 1996). See in particular, 'Mass Mediauras, or: Art, Aura and Media
in the Work of Walter Benjamin', pp. 76-107, and 'Television: Set and Screen',
pp.108-128.
66
Symphony of a Great City,28 Koyaanisqatsi (which in the Hopi

language denotes 'a life out of balance', 'a life which is
disintegrating') presents the city as a well-oiled machine; the
workings of which are contrasted with the more fluid and
unpredictable patterns of nature. Shot predominantly in New York
and Los Angeles, the film represents the city as - and through - a
series of grid-like traffic formations, long queues, and evenly
spaced, pedestrian filled escalators, which are didactically
juxtaposed with shots of billowing clouds, crashing waves and
Southwest American desertscapes.29
Like the film practice for which Benjamin argues, Reggio's claim
for Koyaanisqatsi is that it offers the audience 'a way to re-see the
world, to revisit their sense of ordinary daily living'.30 However,
in contrast to the film practice for which Benjamin argues, Reggio
attempts to realise this task, not by opening up - and thereby

resituating the audience in a relationship of proximity to - aspects
of urban environments which are ordinarily engaged with in an
absentminded state, but by phantasmagorically distancing the
audience from what is taking place. Reggio's presentation of the
28 See Scott MacDonald's interview with Godfrey Reggio in A Critical Cinema 2:

Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, ed. Scott MacDonald (Berkeley, Los
Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1988) pp.378-379.
29 This distinction - between the mechanised workings of the city and the
variable movements of nature - is exacerbated by Philip Glass's dogmatic score,
which leaves little room (concerning the rather heavy-handed distinction that
Reggio is trying to make) up to the imagination of the spectator.
30 MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers,
p.382.
67
city (shot predominantly in time-lapse, and from a series of birds

eye views taken from cranes, satellites and skyscrapers) does
provide the audience with a view of the city with which they are
probably unaccustomed (a view which, Reggio claims, seeks - via
the patterns of movement that time-lapse creates - to draw the
audience's attention to the mechanised manner in which they go
about their day). However, in contrast to the film practice for
which Benjamin argues, Koyaanisqatsi does not counteract, but
rather - by distancing the spectator from what is taking place -
perpetuates the atrophy of experience brought about by
urbanisation.31
In contrast to the fragmentary images of the city that constitute

Berlin or Rain, the face of the city that emerges from Koyaanisqatsi
(with its tributaries of neon and cascading escalators, kaleidoscopic
crowd formations, glittering runways, electronic game and
circuitboard-like landscapes32) has more in common aesthetically
with the turn of the century 'Mood Paintings' that Buck-Morss
describes in her essay; the luminous surfaces of which (like
Reggio's time-lapse images of skyscrapers at night - the lights of
3l Francis Thompson's 1957 NY.NY is a more extreme example of a city film

which cultivates a tactile spectatorial relationship to the image by
phantasmagorically distancing the spectator from the city at which he or she is
gazing. Shot as if through a kaleidoscope, Thompson transforms New York city
into a series of shifting patterns, surreal surfaces, and abstract shapes.
32 Towards the end of Koyaanisqatsi, an aerial view of the city taken from a
satellite is intercut with an image of a circuitboard; the patterns of which are
replicated by the image of the city and vice versa.
68
which go on and off like LCD displays) shimmer

phantasmagorically over the surface of the city like a veil; flooding
the audience with sensation and anaesthetising them from what is
taking place.33
Cut to Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will (a film which

is probably closer to the kind of imaging practice that Benjamin
had in mind when he was writing the 'Epilogue' to the 'Work of
Art' essay) and to the anaesthetising spectatorial effects cultivated
by the surface patterns around which Riefenstahl's presentation of
a rally at Nuremberg stadium is based: Just one of the spectacular
events which took place during the 1934 Nuremberg Party
Convention which Riefenstahl was commissioned to document.34
The sequence in question opens with an image of Hitler and two of

his men entering Nuremberg Stadium, flanked either side by a sea
of tens of thousands of soldiers which has been meticulously
parted to provide a thoroughfare for both Hitler and the
forthcoming parade. When the film cuts to an image of the
proceedings taken from the viewpoint of spectators seated in the
33 Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics', pp.23-24. Even when the camera

returns to ground level (to film, for example, the experience of walking around the
supermarket or driving down the freeway) the pace is accelerated to the point
where the spectatorial experience approximates a ride on a rollercoaster; the
colours of the surrounding landscape blurring together in a manner reminiscent of
Action Painting.
34 For an interesting discussion of the various ways in which this 'extravaganza'
was organised around the camera, see Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to
Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, p.300.
69
upper reaches of the stadium, the soldiers are transformed into a

series of 'living ornaments' or block-like formations; the sharp
lines of which are reminiscent of meticulously kept garden hedge
displays. The Fascist aesthetics of Riefenstahl's film serve as an
inspiration for the kind of phantasmagoric spectacles around
which opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games (and other
major sporting events) are still based.35
Cut to a parade of tens of thousands of flag-bearing soldiers

marching into the stadium; winding like a giant organism down
the pathway that the parted soldiers have created. Cut in closer to a
shot above the parade; to a sea of bobbing swastikas - the blurred
out, glittering texture of which transforms thousands of swastika
bearing soldiers into a phantasmagoric display of light that
resembles an Impressionist painting of sunlight on a lake. The
camera cuts in closer to frame Hitler overseeing the parade, and
then pulls back to reveal an overview of these meticulously
35 For Kracauer's analysis of the spectatorial effects of these, and other

phantasmagoric spectacles, see his essay 'The Mass Ornament'. Kracauer uses this
term to describe the 'stadium images' described above, as well as the American
dancing troupe 'The Tiller Girls' (or 'indissoluble girl clusters', as he otherwise
refers to them). See 'The Mass Ornament' in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,
pp.74-86. Schivelbusch's discussion of the rise of the modem army, and its
development from a 'rider-horse unit' to a 'mass unit' is also fascinating in this
regard. 'When you had a thousand knights in the field', Schivelbusch (quoting
Sombart) writes, 'they still did not constitute one unified mass: they were a
thousand individual warriors, fighting together. But a thousand modern
cavalrymen collaborate to deliver one blow, when they charge.' Schivelbusch,
The Railway Journey, pp.146-148. See also the illustration (on p.147) of the
'square formations' around which sixteenth century combat was organised; the
composition of which bears a striking resemblance to the hedge-like formations
constituted by the soldiers at Nuremberg stadium.
70
organised block-like formations; the surface patterns of which

resemble the textured appearance of agricultural fields viewed
from a plane. As Benjamin writes in conclusion to the 'Work of
Art' essay: 'So it is with the aestheticization of politics, which is
being managed by Fascism. Communism responds by politicising
art'.36
But if Benjamin is arguing that sensory alienation lies at the

source of the aestheticization of politics, and that both sensory
alienation and aestheticised politics are not the sole prerogative of
Fascism, but are being 'managed' by Fascism, what might it mean
to politicise art?37 As Buck-Morss makes clear, Benjamin is.n't
suggesting that communism deploy the camera as a vehicle for its
own propaganda (if this were the case, the 'crisis' and the 'response'
would turn out to be the same thing).38 Rather, as she points out,
Benjamin is demanding of art a far more difficult task: Not to
institute a phantasmagoric spectatorial distance (however close
that distance may feel) between the viewer of the film and what is
taking place on screen, but to undo the alienation of the
synaesthetic system and thereby redeem our capacity for
experience. Within this schema art would cease to be art as we
know it, and the aesthetic would be transformed - or more
36 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.235. Zohn's translation modified by Buck-Morss,

'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics', p.4.
37 Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics', pp.4-5.
38 Ibid. pp.4-5. See also footnote 9, p.5.
71
precisely - redeemed.39
2.2. Habit and Boredom
Which brings me back to my concern with the way that

Benjamin's Freudian analysis of the atrophy of urban experience
brought about by shock, actually seals the big city dweller off from
the kind of aesthetic experience that Buck-Morss is referring to
here. I want to broach this subject from a different angle by
considering the role that habit plays as a protective shield which
anaesthetises the masses from the shocks pumped out by their
environment; a mode of protection which, as I hope to point out,
both perpetuates the atrophy of experience brought about by
urbanisation, and bears the traces through which that atrophy can
be countered.
Simmel's delineation of the atrophy of modern experience brought

about by urban shock would appear to sit uncomfortably with such
an analysis. As I have already pointed out, Simmel argues that
only small town and rural environments - by virtue of the 'slow'
and 'even' manner in which inhabitants of small town and rural
environments engage with their surroundings - cultivate the
'sensory foundations' conducive to the growth of habit. However,
39 Ibid. p.5.
72
what interests me about Simmel's analysis is that he locates these
'sensory foundations' in 'the unconscious layers of the psyche';40
sensory foundations which, as I have already pointed out, differ

radically from those cultivated by metropolitan life, which (as per
Benjamin's Freudian analysis of the atrophy of experience brought
about by urban shock) have their 'locus in the transparent,
conscious, higher layers of the psyche'.41
My point, however, is that if we disregard Simmel's remarks about

the incommensurability of habituated perception and big city life (a
distinction that carries little weight for those of us who have
become habituated to our everyday metropolitan environments)
his delineation of habit - a faculty which has its roots in the
'unconscious layers of the psyche' - provides us with the ground
from which we can begin to consider the radical experiential
possibilities associated with the role that habit plays as an
anaesthetic from the shocks pumped out by urban environments.
Habit can be understood here as a kind of barrier against excess

energies. As such, it is functionally close to, yet diverges
experientially from Benjamin's Freudian analysis of the role that
consciousness plays as a protective shield against shock. To
recapitulate, Freud argues that consciousness wards off excess
40 Simmel, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', p.175.

41 Ibid. p175.
73
energies by deflecting them from the realm in which they could

leave behind an imprint in memory. He writes: 'Becoming
conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processes
incompatible within one and the same system ... Memory traces
are often most powerful and most enduring when the incident
which left them behind was one that never entered
consciousness'. 42
What is significant about habit - and which renders its mode of

operation experientially very different from the protective role
performed by consciousness - is that habit's protective functioning
is based upon a mode of perception which does not involve the
functioning of consciousness.43 That is to say, habit shields us from
excess energies, not by registering and thereby deflecting stimuli,
but through a mode of detachment enabled by a pulling back, a
spacing out from our surroundings; a distancing device afforded by
what Benjamin, in the 'Work of Art' essay, describes as 'a tactile
appropriation' of our environment.44
42 Benjamin, 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire,' p.114.

43 See Benjamin's letter to Theodor Adorno, dated May 7, 1940: 'The Childish
experience of how a madeleine tasted that one day involuntarily popped into
Proust's mind was, in fact, unconscious. It was not the first bite into his first
madeleine. (Tasting is a conscious act.) Tasting, however, probably becomes
unconscious to the extent that the taste became more familiar. The grown up's
"tasting again" is then naturally conscious.' The Correspondence of Walter
Benjamin: 1910-1940, p.629. See also Benjamin's comments on the way that 'images
to which we pay no heed ... remain in the unconscious' in 'Hashish - Beginning of
March 1930', Selected Writings, Volume 2, pp.328-329.
74
While Benjamin does not draw a direct connection between the

radical possibilities of habit and the absentminded mode of
appropriation upon which habit is grounded, his delineation of
boredom in 'The Storyteller' essay (written in 1935) provides us
with a template for an 'absentminded' perceptual state through
which the experiential dead-end of his analysis of the role that
consciousness plays as a protective shield against urban shock can
be countered.45
The passage in question revolves around Benjamin's analysis of

the best possible sensory conditions through which a storyteller's
tale can be integrated into the experience of the listener. He
describes this state - which does not involve the active
concentration or attention of the listener (or, we could add, the
viewer) - in terms of 'boredom'; a state of mental relaxation that is
characterised by a self-forgetful absentmindedness.46 He writes:
This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth,

requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer.
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the
apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that
hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him
away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately
associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and
are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for
45 Walter Benjamin, 'The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai

Leskov' in Illuminations, pp. 90-91. (Hereafter referred to as 'The Storyteller'.)
46 Benjamin, 'The Storyteller', pp.90-91.
75
listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. 47
It is possible, of course, to interpret Benjamin's delineation of

boredom as a state of mental relaxation (in a similar vein to the
manner in which his analysis of the radical possibilities of hashish
and, in particular, flanerie are often talked about) as supporting his
supposed faith in the way that an experience of time as duration
can hatch some kind of experience in its own right. My concern
here, however, is to account for the experiential ground which
would enable an experience of time as duration to serve as a
medium through which the kind of radical aesthetic encounter
that he points to at the end of the 'Work of Art' essay could take
place.48
To this end, what is fascinating about Benjamin's delineation of

boredom is that he spells out the sensory conditions through
which stimuli (be it a story or otherwise) can be integrated into the
47 Benjamin, 'The Storyteller', p.90.

48 In 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', Benjamin refers to Henri Bergson's duree as 'the
quintessence of a passing moment [Erlebnis] that struts about in the garb of
experience'; a comment which spells out the key difference between Benjamin's
delineation of the radical possibilities of film, and Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian
inspired analysis of 'Time Image' cinema in this regard. In the simplest of terms,
what interests Deleuze about the cinema of the time image (he cites, amongst
others, the films of Antonioni, Ozu and Godard) is the way that they present the
viewer with a direct image of time. As Benjamin's criticism of Bergson makes
clear, for Benjamin there isn't anything radical about this experience of time in its
own right. Rather what interests Benjamin is the way that an experience of time
as duration can serve as a medium through which perception in the present can
hook up involuntarily with sense memories from the past. See Benjamin, 'Some
Motifs in Baudelaire', p.145, and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995).
76
experience of the listener. He argues that it is only via this state of

absentmindedness that the surrounding stimuli can ingrain or
incorporate itself into the memory of the recipient. 'The more self-
forgetful the listener is', Benjamin writes, 'the more deeply is what
he [or she] listens to impressed upon his [or her] memory'.49
If we jump to the city (where according to Benjamin's analysis of

the experiential effects of urban shock, consciousness is constantly
invoked as a shield against stimuli) we can begin to see how
Benjamin's delineation of boredom provides us with a way of
understanding the radical promise that he attributes to habit in
'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (which
like 'The Storyteller' essay, was written in 1935).
What is unique about the absentminded perceptual state produced

by habit (and which situates it, experientially, as a particularly
modern form of boredom) is that, unlike boredom, 'a rustling in
the leaves'SO does not drive it away, but provides the stimulus via
which habit is activated as a protective device in the first place.
Faced with a constant bombardment with stimuli, habit
anaesthetises the urban masses from the shocks pumped out by
their environment by enabling them to get a distance from, to
49 Benjamin, 'The Storyteller', p.91. As I discussed in Part One of this thesis, this
absentminded state has a less radical correlate in the form of the classical film
spectator who becomes habituated to the conventions by which continuity editing
constructs a continuous time and space out of a series of image fragments.
50 Benjamin, 'The Storyteller', p.90.
77
space out from their environment. While habit does of course, in

this respect, perpetuate the atrophy of experience brought about by
urbanisation and industrial modes of production, the
absentminded distance from, and insensitivity to stimuli that
characterises the habituated manner in which the urban masses
come to engage with their environment, is built on the back of an
appropriation of that environment; the colours, contours, sounds
and scents of which are incorporated into the memory of the
absentminded urban dweller, just as the story is engrained upon
the memory of the listener in 'The Storyteller' essay.SI
Unlike the twofold experiential possibilities that Benjamin

attributes to boredom - an absentminded state which both lays and
hatches (through an experience of time as duration) the egg of
experience - what is significant about habit is not that it hatches
anything in its own right, but that it lays the egg that enables this
Sl Benjamin argues that the story has to sink into the life of the storyteller in
order that it be brought out of him or her again. 'Thus traces of the storyteller',
Benjamin writes, 'cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to
the clay vessel'. 'The Storyteller', p.91. Benjamin rehearses this line of argument
again four years later in 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', where he draws a
comparison between the process that he outlines in 'The Storyteller' essay and the
functioning of involuntary memory: 'This concept [the memoire involontaire] bears
the marks of the situation which gave rise to it; it is part of the inventory of the
individual who is isolated in many ways'. 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p.113.
(My emphasis.)
78
hatching to take place.52 As I have attempted to point out, what is

radical is the way that the material locked up inside this egg can be
mnemonotechnically hatched through the unconscious optics
opened up by image reproduction devices such as the camera.53
2.3. Customer Feedback
Which brings me to Customer Feedback; a video installation at

Collingwood Safeway by Melbourne video artist Evan Bennett,
consisting of ten colour video monitors planted at various points
throughout the store - above the milk fridges, next to the pasta, at
52 Benjamin's delineation of boredom as a state which hatches (via an experience

of time as duration) the egg of experience can be likened to my discussion of
Benjamin's analysis of the radical possibilities of hashish in the first part of this
thesis. Like Benjamin's hashish trance, boredom functions - in this instance - as a
medium (but not the ground) through which the spectator can experience his or her
environment, and as a consequence, him or herself, in a radically different manner.
53 As David Frisby has pointed out, this capacity is by no means limited to the
camera, but is also the preserve of imaging devices such as mirrors, forms of
lighting, and modem building materials such as glass and iron. See David Frisby,
Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer
and Benjamin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1988) pp.237-238. Joris
Iven's presentation (in Rain) of images of the city reflected in rain puddles on the
pavement, through rain-smeared windows, and in the shiny duco of a number of
cars, is particularly interesting in this regard. See also Kracauer's 'Preface' to his
Theory of Film , in which he attempts to account for the magical impression that
film made upon him as a child: 'What thrilled me so deeply', Kracauer writes,
'was an ordinary suburban street, filled with lights and shadows which
transfigured it. Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a
puddle reflecting invisible house facades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze
moved the shadows, and the facades and a piece of the sky below began to waver.
The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle - this image has never left me.'
Theory of Film, p.li.
79
the checkout.54 Like Safeway's own surveillance getout, each of

Bennett's monitors displays footage collected from within the store
(down the aisle, at the meat freezers, rummaging around the
produce department). However in contrast to the dull scenario
spied from afar by the surveillance cams, the montage sequences
that flash across Bennett's screens confront the shopper (as he or
she is opening a fridge, or reaching for meat) with aspects of the
supermarket environment which are engaged with but not
experienced, visible but not seen.
In a manner reminiscent of Joris Iven's Rain and Walter

Ruttman's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Bennett's videos are
constructed from a series of discontinuous fragments (the glean of
the trolleys, the purple of the meat, the light from a scanner, the
grass green of peas) cut together at a rapid-fire pace to form an
irregular beat. Coca-Cola red flashes up, a till slams, a white coated
arm slaps down some meat. Plastic carry baskets are stack, stacked
into place as the turnstile twirls to the sound of automatic doors
stuck, stuck, stuck on repeat. Trolleys *clink* together as a hand
fumbles for onions and "Thank-You for your co-operation - Next
Customer Please" flits past on screen.
54 Evan Bennett's installation was presented at Smith Street Safeway in

Collingwood, Melbourne, as a part of Melbourne's annual 'New Wave Festival'. It
appeared at Safeway throughout September, 1997.
80
Of course, there are a number of differences between Customer

Feedback and the city films that I discussed in Part One of this
thesis. Customer Feedback is shot on video, in colour, and with a
soundtrack which is synchronous with the images that flash on
and off on screen. More important however, is the way that
Bennett's exploration of 'commonplace milieus under the
ingenious guidance of the camera'SS is presented to the viewer, not
within the confines of a movie theatre, but on location within the
space where the footage was taken; a technical possibility that did
exist at the time that Benjamin was writing, and which resonates
strongly with the kind of imaging practice for which he is arguing.
In fact the technical requirements for an installation such as

Customer Feedback have existed - albeit in a different format - for
some time. The late nineteenth century practice in the United
States, of projecting motion pictures onto large canvases hung at
busy intersections such as Herald Square in New York City,
certainly paved the way for moving image installations long before
the arrival of video. Although the films which were produced
with these exhibition spaces in mind (such as 'The International
Film Company's' 1897 Dewars Scotch Whisky) were pressed into
the service of advertising, their mode of exhibition provides fertile
ground for thinking about the radical effects that moving image
installations could have on the automated collective produced by

81
habit.56
As I discussed in the first part of this thesis, the radical possibilities

that Benjamin is talking about hinge - as per his analysis of 'the
revolutionary strengths of Dadaism'57 - upon film's capacity to
blow apart the threshold separating art from reality; a capacity
which I have traced through the way that the unconscious optics
opened up Iven's or Ruttman's camera can estrange the audience
from their surroundings, and resituate them in a position whereby
aspects of those surroundings (which had 'heretofore floated along
unnoticed in the broad stream of perception') can encounter them
with their glance.SB
What is particularly interesting about Customer Feedback in this

regard, is that Bennett's re-presentation of aspects of the
supermarket environment which are ordinarily engaged with in
an absentminded state within the context of the supermarket itself,
not only breaks down the barrier that separates art from both the
masses and reality, but in a similar vein to the effects of hashish,
prompts those masses - as they are opening a fridge or pushing the
56 For a brief discussion of this turn of the century advertising practice, see
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, Volume 1, The American Screen to 1907
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) pp.169-170. Tom Gunning touches
briefly on these billboard movies in 'The Whole Town's Gawking: Early Cinema
and the Visual Experience of Modernity', The Yale Journal of Criticism (Vol. 7,
No. 2, 1994), pp.195-196. See also Benjamin's comments about advertising in 'One-
Way Street', pp.89-90.
57 Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer', p.229.
82
trolley - to see and engage with their environment in a radically

different manner.
The act of ripping a bag from a roll located in the produce

department is a familiar action, yet - to paraphrase Benjamin - we
hardly know what goes on between hand and plastic.59 Here
Bennett's camera intervenes. In slow motion close-up a hand pulls
a bag across screen. And in the moment before it's torn from the
roll, it becomes a translucent sheath; filtering the reds, greens and
yellows of the fluorescent lit capsicums behind it like a magic
lantern. The sequence is repeated until the bag is torn and the
lantern disappears. And then the white coated arm returns with its
purply red meat. Wrapping and slapping, slapping and stacking:
Close-ups of sirloins and cutlets, minced meat and beef. Trolleys
*clink* together, a hand reaches for apples, standing in line, "Next
customer please".
Although the advent of video has provided the means through

which moving images can be presented to the public, not only on
location within the space where the footage was taken, but in
spaces which would not be able to accommodate a film projector or
59 Benjamin writes: 'The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar

routine, yet we hardly know what goes on between hand and metal, not to mention
how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the
resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its
extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera
introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.'
'Work of Art', p.230.
83
a screen, it is important to note that video artists have, for the

most part, confined their practice within the space of the gallery.
This, of course, not only radically restricts public access to the
presentation, but submerges it within a context which demands
that it be contemplated. While at an intersection in the city, near
the entrance to a station, a pair of Nike sneakers - as big as a truck -
run in slow motion across the face of a skyscraper.
The role that a video installation like Customer Feedback could

play in alleviating (rather than perpetuating) the atrophy of
experience fuelling 'the desire of the contemporary masses to bring
things 'closer' spatially and humanly' (a desire, Benjamin argues,
'which is just as ardent as their bent towards overcoming the
uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction')60 is
rendered more clear towards the end of the 'Work of Art' essay,
where Benjamin separates the radical stakes of a proximate
spectatorial relationship to the image from its more reactionary
contemplative and phantasmagoric correlates.
Benjamin pursues this distinction via a contrast between the

camera operator (in German, Operateur) and the painter; whose
respective practices (in relation to the atrophy of experience that
characterises the masses) can be compared with the healing powers
60 Ibid. p.217.
84
of the surgeon and the magician respectively.61 For Benjamin, the

painter (whose practice is embodied in that of the magician, and I
would add, a long list of filmmakers) maintains in his or her work
'a natural [that is, auratic] distance from reality'; a distance which is
also instated in the relationship between the painting and the
spectator, but which is sensorially reduced by the way that the
subject matter induces in the spectator a sense of immediacy to the
painting; the surface oriented nature of which is encapsulated by
Benjamin's description of the way that this reduction in distance is
due to the manner in which the magician/painter lays - through
each of their respective practices - his or her hands on the body of
the patient/spectator.
For Benjamin, the camera operator (whose practice is aligned with

that of the surgeon) does exactly the reverse. The picture which the
camera operator obtains 'greatly diminishes' the distance between
reality and the spectator, not by the sense of immediacy to the
image induced by 'the laying on of hands' of phantasmagoric
display, but by the camera operator's respective penetration of both
reality and the spectator.
If we cut - with this image in mind - back to my analysis of the

radical possibilities associated with the extension of the camera's
capacity to open up the optical unconscious to the spectating
6l Benjamin, 'Work of Art', pp.226-227. For an interesting reading of this passage,

see Taussig, 'Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds', pp.31-32.
85
collective, it is possible to view the spectatorial relationship

cultivated by the audiences's identification with the powers of the
camera in a different manner. That is to say - in contrast to
Hansen' s analysis of the close relationship between the powers of
the surgeon/ camera operator, and the spectatorial effects of
distanciation62 - I want to argue that Benjamin's surgical analogy
provides us with a different way of conceptualising the radical
possibilities associated with the audience's identification with the
camera. My point is that these possibilities not only overspill the
spectatorial effects of distanciation, but resonate strongly with the
possibilities that Benjamin elsewhere attributes to distraction;
most notably in his analysis of the effects of estrangement brought
about by his experiments with hashish.
Like the powers of perception afforded him by hashish, what is

radical about the spectator's identification with the powers of the
surgeon/camera operator, is the way that the camera's capacity to
open up aspects of commonplace milieus which are ordinarily
traversed in a desensitised, absentminded state, can - as Benjamin's
image of the surgeon's hand demonstrates so palpably - reveal in
the spectator traces of places and moments which have been
appropriated by habit.
62 Hansen, 'Benjamin and Cinema', p.341.

86
In contrast to both the detached, critical, scientific observer that

Brecht associates with Epic Theatre, and the contemplative critic
whom I discussed in the Introduction to this thesis,63 the
spectatorial encounter that I have attempted to describe here is
characterised by a radical destabilisation of the subject. Like Proust' s
encounter with the image of his bedroom distorted by a magic
lantern, and Benjamin's description of the effects of estrangement
brought about by his experiments with hashish, the optical
unconscious opened up by the spectator's identification with the
powers of the camera reveals 'entirely new structural formations
of the subject'64; both in terms of the 'physiognomic aspects' of
commonplace milieus which this operation reveals, and more
significantly, the spectator into whom they flood - via involuntary
memory - as aesthetic experience. Waking the automatic pilot
from his or her anaesthetic, and bursting his /her prison world
asunder 'by the dynamite of a tenth of a second', so that 'in the
midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, [he or she] can calmly and
63 See, for example, Brecht's discussion of the scientific observer of the Epic
Theatre in 'A Dialogue about Acting' in Brecht on Theatre, p.27. For Benjamin's
criticism of what he describes as 'critical distancing', see 'This Space for Rent' in
'One-Way Street', pp.89-90. 'Fools', Benjamin writes, 'lament the decay of
criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It
was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects still counted and where
it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human
society. The "unclouded", "innocent" eye has become a lie, perhaps the whole
nai:ve mode of expression sheer incompetence'. p. 89.
64 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p. 230.
87
adventurously go travelling' .65
As Susan Buck-Morss has argued in another context, it is here -

amidst the shards and debris of these habitually traversed spaces -
that 'technological reproduction [can] give[ ... ] back that capacity for
experience which technological production threatens to take
away'.66
65 Ibid. p.229. This passage reads, in full: 'Our taverns and our metropolitan
streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories
appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this
prison-world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second, so that now, in the
midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we can calmly and adventurously go
travelling'.
66 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades
Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1995)
p.268.
88
Conclusion
The aim of this thesis has been to trace Benjamin's analysis of the
radical possibilities associated with the distracted mode of
perception brought about by film. For Benjamin, these possibilities
are associated with the way that the shock-like organisation and
sensation of film cultivates a spectatorial relationship which
differs significantly from the manner in which the contemplative
spectator engages with a traditional work of art. In contrast to
contemplation, Benjamin argues that the distracted mode of
perception cultivated by film bears a close relationship to the jerky,
proximate sensory experience of the urban dweller, as brought
about by the shock-effect of urbanisation. While Benjamin does, in
the 'Work of Art' essay, speak positively about the rise of a
distracted mode of perception (and the demise of contemplation),
in 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire' he outlines the significant
experiential costs with which the disintegration of contemplation
in the face of shock is associated.I
Drawing on Benjamin's Freudian delineation of the role that

consciousness plays as a protective shield against urban shock, I
have argued that these costs are associated with the manner in
which the distracted mode of perception cultivated by shock wards
1 Benjamin, 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p. 109 - 154.

89
off stimuli from the realm in which they could leave behind a
memory trace. As I have argued, this process dramatically restricts
the functioning of involuntary memory, and as such, would
appear to sit uncomfortably with my reading of Benjamin's
analysis of the radical possibilities with which the distracted mode
of perception cultivated by film is associated.
That said, what I have tried to do in this thesis is to outline the

significant role that Benjamin's habit oriented delineation of
distraction (and crucially, the mode of appropriation upon which
habit is grounded) plays in his analysis of the radical possibilities
brought about by film. While the desensitised, absentminded state
produced by habit does anaesthetise the masses from the shocks
pumped out by their environment, and in doing so, perpetuates
the atrophy of experience brought about by urban life, I have
argued that the key to habit's promise lies in the way that the mode
of appropriation upon which it is grounded, contains the traces
through which the atrophy of experience that characterises the
masses can be countered.
While it has not been my intention to argue that there is anything

radical about habit in its own right, I have argued that what is
radical is the way that the unconscious optics opened up by certain
film and video practices can resensitise the audience, and foster a
different spatio-temporal relationship to aspects of their
environment which are ordinarily traversed in a desensitised,
90
absentminded manner.
In 'The Rose of Babylon', Marcus Bullock argues that Benjamin's

analysis of film is predicated on a conception of 'a future modality
of art'.2 Bullock writes:
This leaves us with the paradox that the film about which
Benjamin writes is one that no-one has yet seen. If the manner of
his presentation does not make that completely explicit, the
reason must be a tactical one. By allowing a sense of reality in this
possibility to blaze out from his pages, he clearly hopes to increase
the conviction which may yet bring it about [... ].3
'Whether a cinema', Bullock writes, 'which would meet

[Benjamin's] criteria is truly possible can only be decided by film-
makers and their audience, not by theoreticians. What those
criteria do offer, nevertheless, is a basis on which one can
determine precisely what the cinema that does exist has failed to
achieve.'4
By recourse to existing film and video examples (that may not live
up to, but which bear certain characteristics that resonate strongly
with aspects of the film practice for which Benjamin argues), my
aim has not been to delimit the contours of the imaging practice
2 Bullock, 'The Rose of Babylon', p. 1100.

3 Ibid. p. 1101.
4 Ibid. p.1113.
91
that he is talking about, but to sustain a degree of hope in 'the

conviction which may yet bring it about' .s I have argued, in
particular, that films like Rain and Berlin: Symphony of a Great
City provide us with an opportunity through which we can
explore Benjamin's analysis of the distracted mode of perception
cultivated by film - as it intersects with habit - because they take as
their object aspects of urban environments which are ordinarily
traversed in a desensitised, absentminded manner.
In contrast to an experience of escapism with which the distracted

mode of perception cultivated by film is commonly associated, I
have argued that the film practice for which Benjamin argues
would not seek to submerge the audience in a realm apart from
their environment, but would instead re-orient the camera's
capacity to capture commonplace milieus at 'face value', and
through a radical practice of montage, break down the threshold
that separates art from reality.
To this end, I have argued that video provides fertile ground for
thinking about the radical effects that moving image installations
could have on the automated collective produced by habit. What is
particularly interesting about an installation such as Customer
Feedback, is the way that its shock-like reconfiguration of the
supermarket environs within the context of the supermarket itself,
S Ibid. p.1101.
92
breaks down the threshold which separates art from both the
masses and reality, and in a similar vein to the effects of hashish,
prompts those masses to see and engage with their environment
in a radically different manner.
Like Benjamin's delineation of the radical effects of hashish, I have

argued that what is radical about the tactile, proximate relationship
to stimuli that he associates with the distracted mode of perception
cultivated by film (and we could add a range of different practices)
is the way that it can serve as a medium through which aspects of
one's environment which are ordinarily traversed absently, can
ignite in the spectator traces of places and moments which have
been appropriated by habit.
For Benjamin, these moments of sudden illumination are

moments when we are 'beside ourselves', and 'while our waking,
habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is
happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by
the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the flame
of the match'. 6 It is as a medium for these moments of
illumination - where perception in the present flashes together

involuntarily with the past - that the distracted mode of perception
cultivated by film can be deemed radical.
6 Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle', p. 343.

93
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The Dialectics of Cinematic Estrangement:

Walter Benjamin, Habit, and the Radical Possibilities of Film

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree

School of Theatre, Film and Dance

Part 1 -The Dialectics of Cinematic Estrangement:

1.1 The Aura, Contemplation and Distraction .............................. 22

1.2 The Radical Possibilities of Film ................................................ 32

1.3 The Face of the City ....................................................................... 38

Part 2 - Searing the Subject:

2.1 Aesthetics and Anaesthetics ....................................................... 52

2.2 Habit and Boredom ...................................................................... 71

2.3 'Customer Feedback' .................................................................... 78

First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor Jodi Brooks

Walter Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle'.

What in the end makes advertisements so superior to

Walter Benjamin, 'This Space For Rent'l

In 'This Space for Rent' Benjamin describes how the spectatorial

1 Walter Benjamin, 'One-Way Street' in One-Way Street and Other Writings

In contrast to the painting, he argues that the shock-like

However, when we turn to Benjamin's 1939 essay 'Some Motifs in

3 Walter Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.231.

Principle' 7) of the role that consciousness plays as a shield that

However, in the 'Work of Art' essay, Benjamin also provides us

7 Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' in On Metapsychology (Volume

tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become

While Benjamin's habit oriented delineation of distraction (and

As will become clear throughout the course of my argument, these

9 Benjamin, 'Work of Art', p.233.

film, but with the camera's capacity to reveal what Benjamin, in

11 Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography' in One-Way Street, p.243.

While this thesis is concerned with tracing the radical possibilities

The Dialectics of Cinematic Estrangement:

For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never

Walter Benjamin, 'One-Way Street'.1

I like to imagine that Benjamin is writing about walking home

1 Walter Benjamin, 'One Way Street', pp.68-69.

unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me, no one knew me'. 2

So for two hours he wanders around in a state of distracted

2 Benjamin, 'One-Way Street', p.68.

spacing out from that environment.3 Once habit - Benjamin writes

engines] can never be restored'.4

And yet there is much in Benjamin's writing that points to

Moreover, I want to argue that Benjamin's accounts of the effects

from their everyday.6

As Benjamin outlines in 'Mysolovice-Braunschweig-Marseille',

6 Benjamin distinguishes his understanding of distraction from its more common

I do not believe that what induced me to take some hashish at

Benjamin describes an encounter with this 'magical hand' (or

7 Walter Benjamin, 'Myslovice - Braunschweig - Marseille', trans. Rodney

However Benjamin's hashish trance does more than render him

In his 'preliminary remark' to 'Hashish in Marseille', Benjamin

One of the first signs that hashish is beginning to take effect is a

I want to emphasise this sense of 'oscillation' (' ... Hin-und

10 Hermann Schweppenhauser, 'Propaedeutics of Profane Illumination' in On

relationship to his environment that Benjamin is talking about.

14 Benjamin, 'Hashish in Marseille', p.678.

Benjamin's path and ignite in him traces of other moments;

A different, though certainly comparable fascination with the way

17 Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle', pp.342-343.

Benjamin's concept of experience.19

The passage from Remembrance of Things Past that I want to

revolves around Proust's joy at the speed with which habit