اثر هنری: بازتولیدِ مکانیکی و صورت فرهنگی پست‌مدرن

در مورد پيش درآمد مقاله موافق ام. در مورد خود مقاله هم اشاره ي جالبي به لش كرده اي. راست اش من هم ديدگاهي نزديك به ديدگاه تو دارم. تا آن جا كه يادم مي آيد پارسال، شايد همين روزها بود كه سرگرم ويرايش ترجمه ي اين متن (ترجمه ي چاووشي) بودم و خيلي مشكلات كلي تر به ذهن ام رسيد و ذهن ام را مشغول كرد. اول اين كه كتاب به كم تر چيزي كه ربط داشت "جامعه شناسي" بود (البته اين في نفسه چيزي از ارزش يا اهميت آن كم نمي كند، فقط فرصت طلبي انتشارات راتلج را مي رساند كه پشت جلد كتاب با آب و تاب گفته بود تا به حال در زمينه ي "جامعه شناسي پسامدرنيسم" كتابي نداشته ايم، فلذا بگيريد كه آمد: اين اولي اش!). مشكل جدي كتاب به نظرم در تقسيم بندي اساسي لش بود در مورد فرهنگ زباني (متني: مدرنيستي) و فرهنگ تصويري (پسامدرنستي) و بعد هم متهم كردن بارت و دريدا به عقب ماندگي و تمجيد از بنيامين و دولوز به خاطر پيش رفتگي ... به گمان ام مي ارزد از اين زاويه هم كار لش را مورد نقد قرار داد.

The Arcades Project - by Walter Benjamin

James L Marsh. Science & Society.

New York: Summer 2001.Vol.65, Iss. 2; pg. 243, 4

Abstract (Document Summary)
"The Arcades Project" by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin is reviewed.

Full Text (1638 words)

The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin. Trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 1074.

This translation of Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk is an important event in the English-speaking intellectual world. Long before its translation, it was already known, along with such works as Bloch's Principle of Hope and Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, as one of the classics of Western Marxism, that tradition within Marxism that claims to take Marx seriously and develop his thought in a non-reductionist dialectical manner, giving full play to the political and cultural as well as the economic dimensions of modem society. Benjamin was loosely aligned with the movement of critical theory in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe as that took form in the thought of Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and others, and consciously writes in The Arcades Project as a critical theorist and his own kind of Marxist.

The Arcades Project is a collection of notes for a book that was never written, organized into convolutes, which are sub-collections of fragments around a certain theme such as "Fashion," "The Collector," or "The Flaneur." As such, even in its fragmentary, incomplete form, it remains Benjamin's master work, up to which all his earlier work leads and of which other published works on Baudelaire, literary-aesthetic theory, and theory of media written at the time he was working on The Arcades Project are partial manifestations.

One way to see The Arcade Project in relation to Marxist theory is to understand Benjamin as extending Marxist theory from the realm of production, the primary focus of Marx's work, into the realm of consumption and linked domains such as fashion, advertising, media, and literary aesthetic theory. Marx's great contribution, or one of them, was to develop an account of production as creation of surplus value. But what are the mechanisms through which surplus value is realized? How is the product advertised, marketed, and sold to the consumer?

Thus an important concept for Benjamin is "phantasmagoria," which is based upon Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. Indeed the term is used by Marx. But what Benjamin picks up and emphasizes and develops is the commodity as possessing a dream-like, pleasing, deceptive surface that hides its origins in production. The Arcades Project is a sustained reflection on the different forms that phantasmagoria can take: in arcades, world exhibitions, department stores, the flaneur, the bourgeois interior, fashion, advertising, and Hausmann's buildings and streets.

Capitalism tends to sell itself and legitimize itself by presenting itself as a dream, a network of phantasmagoria, from which it is necessary to awaken. "Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and through it, a reactivation of mythic forces" (391). The Arcades Project is one long attempt to awaken from this dream, which, as Benjamin understands it, continued into the 20th century. "The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking" (13). Dialectical thinking is the organ of historical, political awakening.

Dialectical thinking as Benjamin understands it contrasts with what usually counts as history, an edifying account of the past that illumines and leads up to and justifies the status quo. History in this sense is part of the dream from which we must awaken. Here a kind of Copernican revolution must take place in which thought, rather than seeing the past as a fixed point upon which we must focus in the present, sees the past as something to be awakened from and overturned in politics - in revolutionary, collective political praxis. Politics has primacy over history; the Paris Commune, discussed toward the end of the book, is one example of the way politics can break out and challenge the dream and replace it, in this case only for a brief time, with a more liberated society. After that, of course, France returned to the capitalist dream world, covering over and legitimating an irrational status quo, and has remained there ever since.

Valid historical reflection, then, takes the form of remembering; "awakening is the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance" (389). We reflect on the past in relation to a possibly transforming political praxis in the present oriented to a liberated future. A linking of the past to the present in the "now of recognizability" (464) is what Benjamin calls the dialectical image. The juxtaposition of past with the present is awakening from the dream. The Arcades Project is filled with dialectical images, like those of rag pickers or prostitutes or collectors, whose function is to awaken us from our capitalist dream sleep. "Prostitution can lay claim to being considered 'work' the moment work becomes prostitution" (348). In this sentence Benjamin brings prostitute and laborer together in one image, such that each illumines the other. He thus develops further Marx's claim in the Grundrisse that capitalism is an era of universal prostitution.

Benjamin's "method" in The Arcades Project, then, is this movement from dream to revolutionary awakening. He is, as much as Marx, uncompromisingly radical. "As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth" (400). If we read this sentence correctly, as Benjamin would have us read it, then we should be stunned into radical, political awakening. We see and we can construct our own dialectical image of beggars and homeless next to shops on Madison Avenue, and remind ourselves of how unjust a system is that produces and tolerates even one beggar. As long as that situation obtains, we still have myth, that is the bad kind of history and social commentary that functions ideologically and is part of the dream.

When we see how uncompromisingly radical Benjamin is, we see also how uncompromisingly Marxist he is. In contrast to some of his postmodern fans, who see the Marxist part of his work as something to be jettisoned or at least de-emphasized, I see his Marxism as essential to his thought. He clearly is also an original thinker in his own right, and, therefore, one does not do full justice to him to refer to him merely as "Marxist," but Benjamin in his full reality cannot be understood without his Marxism.

It is true also that in his aphoristic, fragmentary style of writing and in his identification with the marginalized other, there are elements in Benjamin that appeal to postmodernism. "The rag picker," he tells us, "is the most provocative figure of human misery... in a double sense: clothed in rags and occupied with rags" (349). The rag picker, like the prostitute and worker, are crucial themes in Benjamin that make him appealing to postmodernism, but he relates such themes systematically to the imperatives of capital and the capitalist system. "Love for the prostitute is the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity" (375). This kind of sentence, manifesting sympathy with the oppressed and marginalized but also a systematic Marxist intention and theme, is encountered very rarely in postmodernism. But one finds it all the time in Benjamin.

Benjamin, I would be so bold as to claim, does what the postmodernist tries to do, but he does it better. He also reminds us of how the identification with the marginalized and oppressed is present in Marx rhetorically and systematically. Here I am thinking about the discussion at the end of Capital, I, of the general law of capitalist accumulation and the industrial reserve army. Postmodernism has no monopoly on identification with the oppressed. But Benjamin, because he is Marxist in his own original way, provides a basis for a dialog with postmodernism that is less apparent or possible in Marx. I am thinking here of the affinity and difference between Benjamin's discussion of "phantasmagoria" and Baudrillard's account of "simulacra." Both thinkers emphasize the unreal, fictional, fantastic quality of commodities, media, and fashion in 20th-century capitalist society, but Benjamin much more successfully than Baudrillard relates phantasmagoria to their roots in the production of surplus value. Baudrillard, on the other hand, tends to dissolve political economy into fantastic, fictional, media images, simulacra, and make them the whole story. Here, as with the marginalized other, Benjamin retrieves legitimate postmodern insights, but then relates them systematically and dialectically to political economy.

There is a suggestive, open-ended quality in Benjamin's work that makes it very useful for our political present. If anything, late capitalism in the United States and Europe has become more addicted to the production of information, of image, of image as commodity and commodity as image, than it was in Benjamin's time. In this context, it is interesting to compare and contrast -- though the epochs are quite different -- Napoleon III's illusion-- filled, dream-like politics with Reagan's politics of PR, or the 19th century prostitute and dance revue girl with our late 20th/early 21st-century movie star or fashion model. Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford may be our closest contemporary equivalent to the linking of sex and sexual labor with the commodity. The commodification of women expressed in such figures institutes and legitimates the reign of the commodity fetish, as much or more so than in Benjamin's time.

I sense a need at the end of my review to say a little something about the quality of the translation, which I find more than adequate. In a book this long and so filled with complex literary French and German, there are certainly going to be oversights and errors and omissions and translation decisions with which one can take issue, and these occur in this book. But on the whole, I have found the translation to be reasonably faithful to the original and also idiomatic in that it catches something of Benjamin's impressive literary quality. I end this review with a few Benjaminian sentences that exemplify such quality.

JAMES L. MARSH

[Author Affiliation]
Department of Philosophy Fordham University Bronx, NY 10458

Walter Benjamin's Sparks of Holiness

Peter Brier.

Southwest Review. 0

Dallas: 2003.Vol.88, Iss. 1; pg. 79

Abstract (Document Summary)
Brier discusses the life and works of Walter Benjamin, considered as the antecedent of many ideas that are associated with postmodernism.

Benjamin wanted to perpetuate the search for elusive and traditional "sparks of holiness" necessary for rebuilding the world and remains to be the deepest thinker on the paradoxical relation of literature and theory, art and history.

Full Text (6264 words)

There is no doubt that Walter Benjamin is a precursor of many ideas that are associated with what we now call postmodernism: his stressing of allegory as a correction to Romantic symbolic totalizing; his fascination with language; his equation of art and criticism; his archaeological pursuit of the fragmentary; his historicism and his political passion-and yet all these included and retained older values and ideas. Well after Benjamin had become interested in Marxism, he wrote the following in 1931 to his friend, the Swiss critic and poet Max Rychner: "I have never been able to do research and think in a way other than, if I may so put it, in a theological sense-namely, in accordance with the Talmudic teaching of the forty-nine levels of meaning in every passage in the Torah." All his life he read cultural phenomena as if he were reading a sacred text.

This blending of contradictory ideas goes back to the criticism of Friedrich Schlegel, specifically his idea of Verwirrung, which is best translated as "inspirational entanglement." This is the critical legacy in which Benjamin's sensibility took shape; he wrote his dissertation on the Romantic art criticism of the Schlegels. Benjamin understood very clearly what were once called extrinsic and intrinsic approaches -but he brought them into a dialectical confrontation in which the peculiar form, or intrinsically aesthetic nature of the work in question, literally sacrificed itself to the revelation of a "truth content" that would not have been apparent otherwise; in other words, art may serve truth by exposing its own artifice, but the truth must be grateful, for it would have remained unknown without the martyrdom of art. Kant in his Critique of judgment had established the principle that the aesthetical idea is a complement to the rational idea, and Hegel ultimately followed with the argument that Geist or the spirit of Truth evolved from poetry to philosophy. In the interim Friedrich Schlegel in 1798 had made imperial claims for the powers of the imagination to stir up an endlessly suggestive "universal poesie" in pursuit of elusive unities that often take on a symbolic semblance. He had been given his cue by Goethe's great friend Schiller, who three years earlier in his influential "Aesthetic Education of Man" had announced "Even before Truth's triumphant light can penetrate the heart of man, the poet's imagination will intercept its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be radiant while the dews of night will linger in the valley." Benjamin's German intellectual heritage explains his readiness to mix all sorts of things from the worlds of imagination and feeling with the pursuit of the idea, and later in his Marxist phase all sorts of things from everyday life in pursuit of historical truth.

Like William Blake, Benjamin combined a radical politics with a religious vision and could not conceive of any form of social revolution without spiritual redemption. The combination of these two extremes-secular revolution and religious redemption-is unusual. Radical Protestantism, of which Blake is certainly an avatar, brings them together. Thomas Munzer, the German theologian (Luther's "archdevil"), represented a chiliastic Messianism that Ernst Bloch, in a book read by Benjamin, credited with being a model for Marx. In the main, however, it is Judaism that is known for intertwining messianism and social Justice. Gershom Scholem, a friend of university days who was a strong influence on Benjamin, writes: "Judaism, in all its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event that takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. . . . In contrast, Christianity conceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm, an event that is reflected in the soul, in the private world of each individual, and that effects an inner transformation which need not correspond to anything outside" (The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 1971). Benjamin came to rely on Scholem's idea of communal redemption for the glue that kept the conflicting dialectics of German Romantic Verwirrung and Marxist revolutionary rationalism on a common track.

Another important component of Benjamin's thinking was allegory. It served him as an anchor in the windswept bay of his contradictory ideas. In our own day, Benjamin's preference for allegory endeared him to deconstructionists like Paul de Man, who elevated allegory over symbol because he felt it was less "mystified" about its own status as a fiction and a rhetorical device. The irony here is that Benjamin thought allegory actually brought art closer to the mystical origins of language itself, that it tapped the ability of language to explore the "inexpressible" far more probingly than symbolism, which was committed to the obscurity of suggestive images. There is a short note in his collected papers about his returning to Paris after a long absence and standing in a street near Notre Dame overwhelmed by an inexplicable nostalgia for Paris-even though he is standing on one of its loveliest corners. Why? Because he had forgotten to say the name of the street. Only when he voices its name does the strange feeling of nostalgia subside.

Benjamin thought of all words as a form of naming. Adam "named" the animals in Genesis, and ever since we have pined for the rapture of an equally primary experience through language. Every time we want to speak as if no one had ever heard what we are about to say, we are, thought Benjamin, in pursuit of the original language that Adam used to name the things God had created. In his influential essay on translation, Benjamin insisted that all translation is not motivated primarily by our need to communicate but by our secret urge to recover something of that original language that resurfaces whenever we have to think in more than one.

Benjamin's dedication to the recovery of lost things-his haunting reach for original language, his determination to keep that rendezvous with the messianic promise of social justice-comes in great part from his embrace of the Kabbala, the mystical system of the Jews that reached its fullest expression in the teachings of Isaac Luria in the village of Safed in the northern Galille in Israel after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. What Benjamin understood of the Kabbala he owed to Gershom Scholem, with whom he conducted a lifelong correspondence and whose single-handed recovery of the Kabbala for the modern reader is one of the most astonishing feats of twentieth century scholarship:

In order for a thing other than God to come into being, God must necessarily retreat within Himself. Only afterward does he emit beams of light into the vacuum of limitation and build our world . . . It is a binding rule that whatever wishes to act or manifest itself requires garbs and vessels, for without them it would revert to infinity, which has no differentiation and no stages. The divine light entered these vessels in order to make forms appropriate to their function in creation, but the vessels could not contain the light and thus were broken . . . And what was the consequence of the "breaking of the vessels"? The light was dispersed. Much of it returned to its source; some portions, or "sparks," fell downward and were scattered, some rose upward . . . Hence there is a Galut or Exile of the divine itself, of the sparks of the Shekinah. Into the deep abyss of the forces of evil fell some of these sparks of holiness and yearningly aspire to rise to their source but cannot avail to do so until they have support.

(The Messianic Idea in Judaism)

Scholem concludes: "the Breaking of the Vessels . . . is the decisive turning point in the cosmological process. Taken as a whole, it is the cause of that inner deficiency which is inherent in everything that exists and which persists as long as the damage is not mended" (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1941).

Did Benjamin believe in the literal truth of this mystical teaching? Not any more than Scholem himself, but both, in various ways, saw in it a metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and even political model for the "repair of the world"-in Hebrew, Tikkun Olam. The debt to the Kabbala helps to explain Benjamin's fascination with minutiae, fragments, ruins, quotations-any of which could be shadows of those scattered "holy sparks." He once said that the ideal critical essay could be composed of a string of appropriately connected quotations from a variety of unrelated texts. He was intrigued by Surrealism for its often outrageous juxtapositon of unrelated things precisely because these juxtapositions often stumbled on "sparks of holiness . . . aspiring to their source." In writing on Proust, Benjamin praises his ability to weave from "involuntary memory" the great "web" of his novel, a web tight and durable enough to scoop up "sparks of holiness" from the most drab and morally compromising experiences. "For an experienced event," writes Benjamin "is finite-at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, (i.e. sacred), because it is . . . a key to everything that happened before it and after it." And Proust's remembering is not just a subjective revelation of his soul, but the unwitting analysis of a society based on economic power. We see Benjamin bringing together Marx and the Kabbala in the following:

Proust describes an upper class which is everywhere pledged to camouflage its material base and for this reason is attached to a feudalism which has no intrinsic economic sigificance but is all the more servicable as a mask. . . . This disillusioned, merciless deglamorizer of the ego, of love, of morals-for this is how Proust liked to view himself-turns his whole limitless art into a veil for this one most vital mystery of his class: the economic aspect. He did not mean to do it a service. . . . And much of the greatness of this work will remain inaccessible or undiscovered until this class has revealed its most pronounced features in the final struggle.

Despite all the Marxist terms, the reader of Benjamin's essay is made to feel that the truth content of Proust's novel runs deeper than its economic revelations. So impressed is Benjamin with Proust's contribution to the messianic moment when the world will have recovered the lost divinity of the "shattered vessels," that he credits A La Recherche du Temps Perdu with a brilliant aura. It speaks to us with all the power that a great work of art radiates across time. To Benjamin Proust has avoided the allegorical melancholy of the protagonists in the old seventeenth century dramas who wandered between spiritual and secular worlds surrounded by ruins and unconsoled by nature. Proust discovered the infinite through relentless pursuit of involuntary memory, through, paradoxically, what Benjamin calls "forgetfulness": "For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michaelangelo's on which the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding them up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm" (Illuminations, 1968).

Proust's auratic power is an anomaly in the modern world. In what many believe to be the best extant commentary on Kafka-an essay and a letter to Scholem-Benjamin argues that Kafka's genius is that of an artist who realizes he has no "truth" to convey but devises a rhetorical and fictive strategy to express just that conviction. And instead of evaporating from their own vacuity, Kafka's parabolic and fantastic tales seem locked in a ghost dance, searching for an allegorical definition that never materializes. Benjamin put it unforgettably when he said that Kafka's eerie fiction reads like Aggadah (myth and the fictive imagination), looking for Halacha (the law); art searching for truth. Kafka willed his work to be destroyed; his friend Max Brod disobeyed him. Did Kafka do this because he realized that his art was generated largely by its own negativity? Benjamin comes up with a powerful answer to that question:

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure (Illuminations).

In Kabbalistic terms, Kafka dared to penetrate the deepest darkness, where the brightest sparks eluded him. For Benjamin, "aura" required a gaze between the artwork and the reader/viewer, a gaze triggered by the artwork's spiritual quality, its almost animate embodiment of ritual and magic origins. Kafka is one of those modems, like Beckett, who force us to confront what it means for that gaze to be lost.

Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," comes at a crucial point in his intellectual and personal history. It was written in 1936, three years after Hitler had taken power and just before the purges in the Soviet Union forced Benjamin to confront the full meaning of communist tyranny and duplicity, a revelation intensified by Stalin's pact with Hitler in 1939. After this betrayal, he joked bitterly that, despite his being a Gymnasium (classical high school) graduate, it was time to put aside his "Latin"-thereby ironizing the faith that too many humanists had placed in communism. But in 1936, he was still fully committed to Marxism-though he never joined the Communist Party, not even to please Asja Lacis, a communist lover, nor to comply with the urgings of Berthold Brecht. "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has struck many readers as hopelessly contradictory. On one hand Benjamin seems to be lamenting the diminishing power of art in the modern world: "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art"; on the other, with the passing of aura Benjamin takes political satisfaction in the fact that a certain inhibiting distance between great art and the masses also diminishes. Reproductive technology (photography and film) satisfies the need "to get hold of an object at very close range." In an earlier essay, "The Author as Producer," Benjamin praised the gradual doing away of the distinction between author and public in the Soviet press by the introduction of worker correspondents (a practice soon suspended by Stalin). In another essay, however, written in the same year, "The Storyteller," Benjamin laments the passing of the epic storyteller; the teller of tales conveys a moral (one senses the influence of Brecht); the novel just searches without certainty of finding a moral orientation.

Benjamin's fascination with communications-radio as well as film and photography- may strike us as relevant to our current problems of globalism and related questions. In his time, however, communications-particularly film, perhaps even more than radio-were seen as the principal battleground between fascism and the rest of the world. Benjamin, always something of a romantic, remains in awe of the power of auratic art to reach across time and suspend critical awareness in an illusion of transcendence. At the same time he feared the ability of the Nazis to create an illusion of "aura" by "mechanical" means; to utilize an inauthentic aura for propaganda. To this day viewers look at Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi films (Triumph of the Will, etc.) and are taken in by their symbolic semblance, their appropriation of myth and ritual for ideological warfare. Benjamin was determined to "name" the forces at work in this corrupting art, to expose the symbolic lies of fascism with the allegorical counters of Marxist critique; this meant a close look at the way film manipulated class consciousness and fears. Benjamin was not giving up on "aura," but he was determined to prevent the Nazis from "co-opting it for an aesthetics of war." The contamination of aura was a greater calamity than its withering. Art had no choice but to ground itself in politics-and to Benjamin in 1936 that meant Russian communism, which had assumed a much more vigorous opposition to fascism in Spain than the western democracies and therefore seemed the only viable alternative to Hitler.

Benjamin's decision made him a hero for such Marxist critics as Terry Eagleton as late as the 1980s, but in 1936 it raised objections from Theodor Adorno at the Frankfurt School of Social Research, which had found permanent asylum in New York. Not only was Benjamin's overt embrace of Soviet Russia unacceptable to the Frankfurt School, but Adorno did not think Benjamin's essay sufficiently dialectical when he submitted it to the journal Adorno edited. Did Benjamin not see how the capitalist reification of the arts through technology gave little support to the belief that communism would do any better? Adorno's commitment to permanent dialectic made him think that Benjamin, under Brecht's influence, had settled for too naive a resting place. With emendations and changes that depoliticized the essay but made it seem more contradictory than it was, Adorno did allow it to appear in the Institute's journal. Benjamin was criticized from the extreme left as well. When Brecht saw it in 1938, he wrote in his diary "Everything is mystical, despite an anti-mystical attitude. In such a form does he adapt the materialist theory of history! It is rather horrible." Both Adorno and Brecht failed to grasp the real issue. Once Benjamin has reviewed all the technical innovations, the close-up, the "surgical" power of the film camera to create illusions of reality beyond the dreams of any painter, he closes in on the crucial truth for the modern person who lives ill an age of film. The constant and abrupt change of images to which the film viewer is subjected, which has increased consistently in film history to our own time, "constitutes the shock effect of the film, which like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind." And this is followed, and in a footnote, by the following:

The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life that modern man has to face. Man's need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film 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.

For centuries art as aura had reached out to the viewer and reader in reciprocal gaze across a tactful distance with the songs, words, and images of traditional ritual and history. The non-auratic art work par execellence, film-the cinema-embraces us in overpowering illusions of reality and conditions us to the endless threat to our bodily existence. We are now, implies Benjamin, furtive creatures in a nature darkened by history where political tyrannies are the new beasts of prey. The movies are physical training for Nazi arrest and deportation. Fortunately, Surrealism had provided a sneak preview. Benjamin writes: "By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect." The distance that aura provided for a reciprocal gaze, even in the fashionable art of the recent past, between art and viewer or reader has been replaced by a threatening intimacy in a dark movie house. Scholem was disturbed by the essay because he felt Benjamin was moving beyond his own instincts, that he had left his post at the crossroad between literature and politics and had gone over completely to the political side. Far away in Jerusalem, he, just like Adorno in London, and later New York, could not fully grasp the terror that Benjamin knew was coming. From Paris Benjamin wrote Scholem that in Berlin the Nazis had turned off the free municipal gas to all Jewish residences; too many were wasting it to commit suicide.

The one thing Benjamin did not do was panic. All who knew him attested to his remarkable patience. Although he had planned suicide at the very outset of the Nazi threat in 1932, he changed his mind and instead began work on his memoir of childhood. Inspired by Proust, Benjamin felt that the challenge of the moment was how to make sense of extremes, the extremes of beginning and end-not only his own, or even just that of the world around him, but rather of the world of his time, the modern bourgeois world that he sensed had reached its twilight hour in which birth and death would coalesce in revelation. Revelation was a source of redemption, what Benjamin called the Jetzt Zeit, the now time, when extremes of experience forced a heightened perception. Catastrophes, in their own strange way, were proof of their opposites. Having survived them in the past, the rabbis had argued that one had the evidence that they need not be the last word on the meaning of experience.

What he now felt he had to do was chronicle the process, not to bear witness as a mere observor of the immediate crumbling world of the 1930s, but to extract from the accumulating debris of preceding generations the "laws" of humanity, the truth of the historical meaning in the long narrative of mankind's search for redemption. He could not remain in the dark cave of the cinema and submit to its deintellectualizcd shock therapy. He was in Hell and he needed a Virgilian guide. Kafka's art had approached the door of the problem, but as in his many parables, he lacked the key or the word to open it. Baudelaire, on the other hand, perhaps because he still had the integrated sensibilty of a late romantic lyricist, did succeed in a form of immolation; he sacrificed himself as an artist, and in the ashes of his poetry the hard fragments of irreducible truth are exposed: a shining fool's gold, the truth of modern materialism, what Baudelaire himself had called the "beauty of ugliness." Baudelaire tore away the facade that separated poet and reader and forced a recognition that both were at the mercy of the crowd, immersed in the street life of the modern city that shattered illusions of privacy and inviolate self-hood. The phantom crowd evokes in Baudelaire a corresponding "phantom crowd of words, the fragments, the beginnings of lines from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the poetic booty" (Illuminations). And he did it with allegory. This is Benjamin's distinct claim, that Baudelaire, the father of modern symbolist poetry, was actually an allegorist. In an important essay on Benjamin (New York Review of Books, January 11, 2001), J. M. Coetzee observes that in "Le Cygne" Baudelaire "allegorizes the poet, as a noble bird, a swan, scrabbling about comically in the paved marketplace, unable to spread his wings and soar." He is an absurd intruder imposed on the commodity-driven cityscape of a "widowed" Paris; his anguish, that of the alienated poet, is allegorized while the city's "soul-less" condition is symbolized in a stream of images and allusions. Coetzee maintains that Benjamin, with Marx in mind, "argues . . . that allegory is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities." Yes, but perhaps allegory is even more appropriate for the alienated poet than the illusory and fetishized world he must interpret. The poet's intrusion outflanks the symbolic import of his creation. Benjamin's conception of Baudelaire's persona calls to mind, among other moderns, the hovering speakers of the Cantos and The Waste Land-who resemble Baudelaire's allegorical swan.

Benjamin dedicated himself after 1935 to what he called the "Arcades Project." It changed its name several times, but never its purpose. By pursuing Baudelaire's references to the sordid commodified world that hurt him into his painful lyrical outbursts (the prostitutes and ragpickers of the Fleurs du Mal), Benjamin felt he was riding the coattails of genius to an even larger truth than Baudelaire dared to imagine. Instead of merely reading the sacred texts of the poets, Benjamin would read the texts of history itself-not only the writers major and minor, but the trivial observations of the popular press as well as the signs, literal and figurative, of the Paris street. His method was Marxist, in so far as he understood Marx. He never read his later works, but what really mattered was the thoroughness with which Benjamin pursued the quest. It was his way of fighting the darkness as he saw it, the endless lies that the bourgeois world of material capitalism had been telling itself for generations and that had finally come to roost in the darkness of Hitler. He was now the scholar-critic working against time to show the world the origins of its own corruption. He adopted the persona of the flaneur, the stroller, a seer composed of dandy and prophet who would sift through the rubble of time and draw together bits and pieces that might provide clues of the whole that had been shattered. He was at once the Talmudist laboriously testing each of the forty-nine interpretations, the Kabbalist searching for sparks of holiness embedded in the encrusted debris of the past, and the Marxist pursuing his dialectical path.

Just as he had demystified specific texts by Goethe and Kafka in earlier critical essays, he would now expose the mystifications of a received history that had brought Europe to the brink of disaster: "The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man . . . Therefore the destructive man is reliability itself" (Reflections, 1978). Benjamin's flaneur, his daemonic stroller who follows Baudelaire's footsteps from the Paris of the 1830s and 40s on through the middle of the century and beyond is, perhaps, even a more ominous figure than Blake's wanderer, who, almost 150 years before Benjamin, "marks" signs "of weakness and woe" in the commodified streets of "chartered" London. What Benjamin, the stroller as researcher, extracts first from the poet Baudelaire and then from the city in which Baudelaire was a wanderer is no less revealing than what Blake extracts from his own visionary experience.

Already in his memories of a Berlin childhood, writes Susdan Buck-Morss (The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 1999), Benjamin had noted how "public space, the city of Berlin, had entered into his unconscious and, for all his protected, bourgeois upbringing, held sway over his imagination." Blake's "mind-forged manacles" are forged by the "chartered streets"-in Benjamin's case, they are forged by covered markets, shopping excursions, brothel rooms, etc. What Blake largely juxtaposes-the tyrannies of commerce, church, state, and sexual repression-are sifted by Benjamin in his Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, through an involved dialectical survey, not dialectical enough to please Adorno, but sufficiently probing to get Adorno to concede that Benjamin was being true to his "destructive" manifesto. His project was an elaborate exercise in montage, but it did more than juxtapose fragments of historical evidence. The idea was to confront the fragmentary truth and transform it into a "readable" text with a negative aura of its own. This, however, was no longer the production of art or literature; it represented, in Benjamin's eyes, the only form in which modern philosophy could be erected. In other words, he was erecting a theoretical foundation for a fresh understanding of historical truth. He was not engaging literary materials as a literary critic, but engaging them in a swirl of other evidence, empirical and textual, that would produce a new epistemology or way of knowing.

Edited in 1982 by one of Adorno's students, Rolf Tiedeman, the Arcades Project consisting of more than 1300 pages of essays and notes, has recently been translated into English. The essays on Baudelaire and nineteenth-century Paris were published in the Frankfurt Institute journal in the 30s, but the vast bulk of this collection of writings consists of notes, carefully classified, beginning with a catalogue of Paris arcades, those glassed-in passageways lined with curious shops and stuffed with consumer goods; this is followed by sections on fashion, advertising signs, mirrors, streetcars, railroad stations; this review of commodities and goods is interspersed with sections devoted to art galleries, prostitution, photography, illuminated gardens and cafes and finally by observations on thinkers and artists like Fournier, Marx, and Daumier. These notes do not read like source material for a book with a developing thesis; so much thought goes into every entry that they seem more like powerful fragments involved in a chain reaction of ideas that could never be contained in one opus or study. Benjamin is writing literary, architectural, aesthetic, intellectual and philosophical, political and social history at one fell swoop; he seems to be duplicating the action of history in the course of thinking about it. The mind, by concentrating primarily on place-Paris-is catching up with time, belatedly but not too late; the owl of Minerva, Hegel's owl, seems to be taking wing at the twilight hour of the early modern world. Baudelaire's poetics of shock, energized by twentieth-century Surrealism, enables Benjamin to render what he called the "decay of experience into a fetishizing of consumer goods," a vividly felt thing. He is not being merely encyclopedic or curiously "anatomical." There is something infectious, almost joyful, in the way this basically melancholy man is gathering up the confetti of history. Benjamin experimented with hashish in Marseilles but dismissed its titillating disorientations as trivial compared to the excitement of thinking. He seems caught up in a rediscovery and refashioning of Schlegel's Verwirrung. As he went on thinking every day at the Biblioteque Nationale, cramming observations into his notebooks with that tiny meticulous penmanship that has driven his editors to distraction, he was laying out the process that has developed into what we call "theory" today; he was planting the seeds of the new historicism, cultural "negotiations" with language and art.

In a short entry in the Passagenwerk Benjamin dismisses Zola's naturalist theories regarding the psychological determinisms of temperament; they have nothing to do, he writes, with the sensational plot and blood-letting of the novel, Therese Raquin, where lovers murder the heroine's husband and then, in remorse, take the poison they had intended for the dead man's mother. It's all about the gradual decay of the Parisian world, says Benjamin; as the arcades become more and more seedy, they exude a poisonous atmosphere that commodifies and vulgarizes the emotions-all of which is reflected in the sensationalism of the novel that panders to the corrupted taste of an increasingly materialized world. The reader is persuaded that urbanism in nineteenth-century Paris is a series of dehumanizing and exploitative acts carried out in the name of "progress." The workers' sections of Paris are demolished to make way for the great boulevards. Not only does this discourage the barricades of revolution, but it also forces the workers into the suburbs and creates a wave of land speculation that makes the rich richer. The beautification of Paris, at the expense of the masses, in the nineteenth century is a rehearsal for the aestheticization of politics by the Nazis in Benjamin's own time. The constant change in women's fashions become an allegory for "transiency without progress," a relentless pursuit of novelty that brings about nothing new in history. Fashion epitomises the hell of modernity, a configuration of repetition, novelty, and death. Change itself becomes a fetish. To combat this meaningless transiency, this illusion of "progress" in history, Benjamin begins to look backward at the small discarded objects, the outdated buildings and fashions that, precisely as the trash of history, are evidence of its uprecedented material destruction.

Something begins to happen to Benjamin in the course of this relentless mapping of the birth of the modern, this still-birth of progress. He puts on the brakes and begins to run the film backwards-slowly. Memory is the rediscovered power. The "aura" of the traditional work of art, fading at every hour, must be attended to. In the midst of his work on Baudelaire, in 1939, he returns to Proust whom he celebrated ten years earlier. Proust remains the great model for the archetypal "storyteller." In the absence of a voluntary memory, which has been weakened by our superstitions of the future, Proust's involuntary memory, all "eight volumes of it," maintains a connection with infinity. It becomes the sacred text and must be read at even more than forty nine levels of meaning. In another project conceived at this time, Benjamin shakes off the decadence of Parisian progress and takes a holiday with a moving collection of letters, also fragments of the past, but each suffused in the aura of sincere feeling. They represent the voices of highly individualized lives and exude a symbolic complexity rather than allegorical precision. Emigres, scholars, dedicated revolutionaries from the idealistic time of the revolution of 1848, they fill a small book Benjamin entitled German People (Deutsche Menschen, 1936). This collection of pre-modern "saints" is a direct challenge to Hitler's glorification of the racially defined German masses.

One of Benjamin's last works, his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), includes the following observations:

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.

To be sure only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.

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

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from conformism that is about to overpower it.

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might come.

Walter Benjamin could not have foreseen at what crossroad he would stand in our day. For us he stands less at the crossroad of literature and politics, or Marxism and religion; rather, he stands at the crossroad of criticism and theory, a barricade of our own construction. His historical materalism would draw him to the theorists; his awareness of the authority of tradition and the call of aura would tempt him to step back from allegorical abstraction and remember the critical idealism informing Friedrich Schlegel's Verwirrung-the Kabbalistic promise of all antinomies resolved in a reintegrated world. Even Adorno, his fellow dialectician, more rigorous than Benjamin himself writes: ". . . the idea of harmony is expressed negatively by embodying contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure."

Benjamin's rediscovered sense of the importance of traditional aura in the very act of fashioning a philosophy of knowledge in which literature had a subsidiary function, might give us some pause about our own priorities today. Do we want theory to serve literature or do we want literature to serve theory? Literary criticism has, of course, always been theoretical in one form or another. Its ability, in Matthew Arnold's famous words, "to see the object as it really is" involves equal attention to the uniqueness of literature in itself and to its cultural connections. If we read less closely in order to read more objectively in a political or cultural sense, we run the risk of losing our grasp of something becoming more elusive with every day: the institutionality of literature. If we read hermetically, as if literature were a hot house flower, a cultist truth or false religion, we begin to gasp for air. But if we do not read the literary legacy we have inherited, we may lose our taste, in the fullest sense of that word, for life itself.

The Orwell scholar David Kubal, in an essay from his posthumous collection, The Consoling Intelligence (1981), writes the following about an old print of St. Clement Danes that the hero of 1984 accidently comes across: "The symbol (the print of the church) . . . represents Orwell's political vision. Founded on the idea of historical continuity and on the necessity of maintaining the concept of objective truth, sustained by language both flexible and concrete, his politics affirmed the irrepressible, phoenix-like morality of the ordinary and the human-to be asserted through revolution if need be-over against the power of absolutes." Benjamin, too, in maintaining the contradiction between literature and history despite their perpetual coexistence in dialectical confrontation, wished to perpetuate the search for those elusive and traditional "sparks of holiness" necessary for the rebuilding of the world. He remains the deepest thinker we have on the paradoxical relation of literature and theory, art and history.

[Author Affiliation]
PETER BRIER is the author of Howard Mumford Jones and the Dynamics of Liberal Humanism (University of Missouri Press, 1994). The essay on Walter Benjamin was originally given as a lecture in January 2002 in a slightly different form for the David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture Series at California State University, Los Angeles, where Brier has taught the Romantics and literary criticism since the early 1970s.

Walter Benjamin (1936)

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

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Source: UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.

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“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
Paul Valéry, Pieces sur L’Art, 1964
Le Conquete de l’ubiquite

Preface
When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

I
In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence:

“Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

II
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.”

Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

III
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt – and, perhaps, saw no way – to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to 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. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

IV
The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position.)

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

V
Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

VI
In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult 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. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. 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 appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

VII
The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early theories of the film. Abel Gance, for instance, compares the film with hieroglyphs: “Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians ... Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it. There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses.” Or, in the words of Séverin-Mars: “What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience.” Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy about the silent film with the question: “Do not all the bold descriptions we have given amount to the definition of prayer?” It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it – with a striking lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were published, films like L’Opinion publique and The Gold Rush had already appeared. This, however, did not keep Abel Gance from adducing hieroglyphs for purposes of comparison, nor Séverin-Mars from speaking of the film as one might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico. Characteristically, even today ultrareactionary authors give the film a similar contextual significance – if not an outright sacred one, then at least a supernatural one. Commenting on Max Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Werfel states that undoubtedly it was the sterile copying of the exterior world with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, motorcars, and beaches which until now had obstructed the elevation of the film to the realm of art. “The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities ... these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.”

VIII
The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

IX
For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. “The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence .... The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.” This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film “the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible ... ” In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw “the latest trend ... in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and... inserted at the proper place.” With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.

X
The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. These arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertofl’s Three Songs About Lenin or Iven’s Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of contemporary literature.

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

All this can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

XI
The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. – unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

XII
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses.

Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.

XIII
The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective. The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable 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. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. 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 the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really 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, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

XIV
One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions – though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Before a painting of Arp’s or a poem by August Stramm it is impossible to take time for contemplation and evaluation as one would before a canvas of Derain’s or a poem by Rilke. In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.

From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.

XV
The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel 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.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.

The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.

Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception 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 appropriation.

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

Epilogue
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization 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 putrefaction 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 ... may be illumined by them!”

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

من دو تا مشكل كلى با نظريه‌ی بنيامين درباره‌ی «هاله» و تحولاتِ آن در «عصر» ماقبل توليد مکانيکی و مابعد آن دارم که همين‌طوری غيرسيستماتيک می‌گويم (و خوش‌حال می‌شوم نظر يا نقدت را «بشنوم»):

يکی اين‌که به نظرم حرفِ بنيامين درباره‌ی تحليل‌رفتنِ نقشِ آيينی اثر هنری کمی کلی‌گويی‌ست و بايد در ظرف زمانی و مکانی (و زمينه‌ی اجتماعی‌-تاريخی) خاص خود سنجيده شود. حتی در «بازتوليد مکانيکی» و الکترونيکی و فتوشاپی! هم چنين حرفی را به نظرم نمی‌توان با قطع و يقين زد. برای نمونه کافی‌ست به عکس‌ آيت‌ الله سيستانی در اين آدرس نگاهی بيندازی:‌ http://sistani.org و آن را مقايسه کنی با عکس اصلی داخل صفحه‌ی عکس‌های همين وبسايت. اين عکس يک «هاله‌» فتوشاپی دارد که به نظرم خيلی خوب حس اقتدار و «رعب» را، نسبت به مدلول اين عکس، ايجاد می‌کند (اقلآ در مخاطبی که «زيبايی‌شناسی دريافت» خاصی دارد). باز هم برای نمونه، برای اين‌که ببينيم «عوام» از اين عکس و مشابه آن چه استفاده‌هايی می‌کنند، کافی‌ست نگاهی به صفحاتِ گفت‌وگوی اين‌جا بيندازی: http://www.shiachat.com گاهی بين اعضای گروه درباره‌ی نحوه‌ی استفاده از عکس‌ها هم بحث می‌شود که خيلی جالب است.

به‌طور کلی‌تر، به نظرم تلقی بنيامين از مقوله‌ی «آيين» ممکن است کمی ساده‌انگارانه باشد. او «آيين» را در نظامِ کاپيتاليستی يا مارکسيستی يا هر نظام سياسی-اقتصادی مدرن ديگری يا نمی‌تواند ببيند يا نمی‌خواهد ببيند (و به جايش قائل به عقل‌گرايی‌ای می‌شود که به نظرم باز هم خيلی ساده‌انگارانه است). تصاويری که برای آيين‌های مذهب «دموکراسی» سکولار (از قبيل انتخابات، مثلآ، يا تظاهرات!) دائمآ بازتوليد می‌شوند و عوام می‌توانند در هرجا (حتی در اتاق خواب‌شان) با آن‌ها ارتباط برقرار کنند، به‌نظرم از «هاله» هيچ‌چيزی کم ندارند. و البته باز هم «زيبايی‌شناسی دريافت» مهم است، و فکر می‌کنم بنيامين به اين نکته بی‌توجه است.

رسيدم به نکته‌ی دوم: من زياد از نظريه‌ی بودريار درباره‌ی «سيمولاکرام» simulacrum نمی‌دانم، ولی همين‌قدر که می‌دانم به نظرم می‌آيد که گم‌شدنِ «مدلول» در سلسله‌ی تصاويری که بودريار به عنوان سيمولاکرال می‌شناسد، برای خود باعث ايجاد «هاله‌»ی جديدی می‌شود که هدفش همان ارعاب و اقتدار است. نمونه‌هايی که بودريار درباره‌ی تصاوير جنگِ خليج (1991) دارد به نظرم خيلی عالی هستند. تصاوير در اکثر موارد به هيچ «مدلول» خارجی اشاره نمی‌کنند، ولی با زنجيره‌ای که بين خود ايجاد می‌کنند، فريبِ جديدی را با هاله‌ی بسيار قوی ايجاد می‌کنند (که اتفاقآ بدونِ بازتوليد الکترونيکی ممکن نمی‌بود) و همه را مجذوب و گروگانِ خود می‌کنند. همين‌جا هم باز به نکته‌ی اول می‌شود برگشت و «آيين»های مدرنی را که به اين هاله مشروعيت می‌بخشند ديد: مثلآ آيينِ تماشای خبر ساعت 10 شب.

The Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate

http://www.wbenjamin.org/walterbenjamin.html

پويان جان سلام،
بحثِ جالبی است و چند بار خواستم نظر بدهم انداختم به بعد، انقدر هم فکر کردم طولانی می‌شود که شايد اصلاً مطلبِ مستقلی می‌نوشتم. به هرحال چند نکته که حالا به ذهنم می‌رسد... بقيه باشد حضوری بحث کنيم. :)
1- نمی‌دانم آن آقا چطور نقدِ فرهنگِ آدورنو-هورکهايمر را پست‌مدرن دانسته. اين که اين دو را چطور می‌توان به پست‌مدرنيسم «چسباند» واقعاً برای‌ام جالب است. در موردِ بنيامين ولین بی‌شک و بدونِ تعصّب تأويلی پست‌مدرن ممکن است (از آن دستی که خودِ طرفدارانِ چپِ نظريه‌یِ انتقادی دارند، مثلِ برونر که در کتابِ «نظريه‌یِ انتقادی و نظريه‌پردازان‌اش» می‌گويد «تصورِ اينکه بنيامين به نوعی بازیِ پست‌مدرن مشغول بوده لکّه‌دار کردنِ کارِ اوست و...» و البته همانطور که قبلاً به‌ات گفتم اين نقد را نمی‌توانم بپذيرم چون خارج از آن گفتار و به طورِ بيرونی –و نه نقدِ درونماندگاری که آدورنو می‌پسنديد- است و مثلاً بازی را با خوارداشت به کار می‌برد...) بنيامين به هرحال در اصحابِ نظريه‌یِ انتقادی تک و ويژه است و می‌دانيم که هرگز به عضويتِ رسمیِ مؤسسه‌یِ پژوهش‌هایِ اجتماعی (مکتبِ فرانکفورت) درنيامد و هرچند همکاریِ نزديکی با آدورنو داشت با نامه‌نگاری و... مثلاً دوستی‌اش با برشت هميشه مايه‌یِ کراهتِ آدورنو و آنها بود يا عرفانِ خاصِ يهودی‌اش به سببِ دوستی با شولم با ماترياليسم‌اش از نظرِ بعضی در تناقض بود...
2- نفهميدم چرا نامِ پيشنهادیِ مهرگان را نپذيرفته‌ای؟ توضيحِ او برایِ من قانع‌کننده بود، اينکه منظورِ بنيامين «قابليتِ بازتوليدِ تکنيکی» است نه صرفاً وجودِ چنين بازتوليدهايی. (مثلاً همان قضيه‌یِ عکاسی اين را روشن‌تر می‌کند) بنابراين تأويلِ ديگری از بحث‌اش ممکن می‌شود. اينکه امروزه «می‌توان» موناليزا را عينِ خودش کپی کرد و بر ديوارِ اتاق چسباند کافی است تا ارزشِ آيينی و جادويیِ آن را از بين ببرد و مفهومِ اصالت را در فلسفه‌یِ هنرِ جديد تا حدی بی‌معنی کند...
3- چرا خبر ندادی به هرحال جلسه را؟! من که خبر می‌دم تو هم بده ديگه نارفيق! ;)

http://www.kargah.com/alimadadi/ashura/index.php?action=show&picid=3733

http://www3.metrowestdailynews.com/images/localRegional/natick06012004.jpg

http://www.france-fdh.org/photos/musique/Che.jpeg

" Benjamin's quaint confidence that the modern political project was primarily rational rather than ritual cannot be sustained. Nor, for that matter, can his linkage of ritual and the singularity or authenticity of art (Starrett 1995). There is no epistemological break between older and newer expressive forms, merely new occasions on which actors can deploy them. The difference in photography is that its indexicality-not its uniqueness-is perceived as the ground of its authenticity and truth.23

However, documentary photography as art and as rhetoric-not to mention other mass-reproducible forms, such as prints, plastic statues, stickers, and videotapes-refuses to relinquish its ritual status. In Egypt, the newspaper photograph is part of the machinery transforming a worldview of public unity into the material force of mass action. Photographs testify to the historical veracity of public events independent of their origin and thus lend themselves particularly well to ritual use, which depends fundamentally on the generation of public behavior and disposition and only secondarily on the creation of common belief (Daniel 1996:102; Rappaport 1979; Wedeen 1998).24"

The above are two paragraphs from the article below:
__________________

Violence and the rhetoric of images
Gregory Starrett. Cultural Anthropology. Washington: Aug 2003.Vol.18, Iss. 3; pg. 398

Abstract (Document Summary)
Starrett discusses the politics of visual representation, specifically about how a documentary photograph can be used to mobilize collectivities. Documentary newspaper photographs act as a discourse of emotional engagement and by representing emotions visually; photojournalism engages the passions of a diffuse audience and expresses that engagement as a spontaneous unified outpouring of feeling.

Full Text (14785 words)
Copyright American Anthropological Association Aug 2003
Photographs [have] become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.

-Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

-Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

In early spring 2001, two campaigns of iconoclasm-one literal, one virtual-were playing out in southwest Asia and the well-worn ideological landscapes it defines in the Western imagination as a religious, political, and cultural "center-out-there" (Turner 1973). On March 3, soldiers of Afghanistan's Taliban militia began destroying thousands of statues on the orders of their leader, Muhammad Omar. Small clay figurines in museums were hammered and crushed underfoot. Two soaring images of the Buddha, which had been carved into the sheer sandstone cliffs overlooking the Bamiyan valley centuries ago, met with a Procrustean attack beginning with the effacement of their heads and feet by antiaircraft missiles. By the end of the first day, two-thirds of the country's statues had been destroyed, and it was announced that those remaining would be completely destroyed by the Feast of the Sacrifice, which is the annual commemoration of the patriarch Abraham's single-minded commitment to God. "These idols," explained Omar, "have been the gods of the infidels," and there is no room for them in a Muslim country (Parley and Wright 2001; Moore 2001; Shah 2001).1 Meanwhile, the American news agency MSNBC was experiencing a ratings battle between Palestinian and Israeli sympathizers over a photograph of the killing of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura. The boy was shot to death by Israeli forces on September 30, 2000, as he huddled, terrified and crying, behind his father in the midst of a furious gun battle in a Gaza street. Palestinian photographers working for French television caught the incident on tape, and a photo was posted on the MSNBC web site as part of their "Year in Pictures 2000" contest. For three weeks, the photograph was the leader in on-line voting for best picture. But then Meirav Eilon Shahar, an Israeli diplomat in Los Angeles, started an e-mail campaign urging Israeli supporters to vote for other photographs. Shahar's allegation that Muhammad's father led him into the crossfire for publicity was met by countercharges that Israel was distorting the incident for similar reasons. As a result of the campaign, the photo of Muhammad's killing fell to sixth place in the photo contest, behind five animal pictures, including one of a dog straining to get through a fence to urinate on a fire hydrant (Charlotte Observer 2001).

The Buddhist statues and the photo of the boy's death are two radically different sorts of images. But the mountain of graven stone and the ceaseless transmediation of electronic code share a social origin and a social fate. Born in the collective mobilization of human groups to craft objects of memory, both have become focal points of emotionally powerful battles over self-definition, over history and forgetting, and over the nature of truth and virtue. Both are idols.

In arguing about what truths these idols represent, Palestinians, Israelis, American Jews, academics, journalists, computer and photography buffs, Afghan politicians, Iranian and Pakistani mullahs, the Dalai Lama, UNESCO officials, and horrified museum directors across the world struggled to define the nature of images and what they signify about human nature, motivation, and history.2 The statues and the photograph became objects of contest in part because of their place within specific traditions of representation (faith, secular art history, photojournalism) and larger traditions of politics and culture. It was these traditions as much as the images themselves that were being contested. However, the immediacy of representative images disguises their social nature. Their seeming transparency, simplicity, and distance from language restricts our consciousness of their essential sociality (Barthes 1985; Mitchell 1986). Thus, the Taliban claimed to be destroying statues of Buddha because of what the images represent-infidel gods-rather than because there were infidels arrayed around them. The video image of a screaming child was read as a narrow statement about his father's intent rather than the twisted political affinities of the image's viewers. Viewed obliquely these alternative readings can fall into relief. Spectacles that appear to signify virtue or vice to the viewer derive their power from the relationships the images mediate between the viewer and other people. In our horror at Taliban destructiveness, we become the infidels arrayed in impotent solidarity around the statues. Similarly, MSNBC's web viewers constitute themselves as collectivities, through multiple mediations, around the slaughter of Palestinian children.

This article is about the politics of visual representation, specifically about how the documentary photograph can be used to mobilize collectivities.3 In the two cases above, images became the medium for transnational political contests in which opposing groups mobilized by projecting onto those images fundamental values: purity versus idolatry, heritage versus fanaticism, injustice versus innocence, cynicism versus responsibility. In exploring this further, I will use another Middle Eastern case study, an interlinked series of spectacles created and reported in the Cairo press during the summer of 1993. Unlike the first two stories, these spectacles were not widely reported outside Egypt, yet they have become central to contemporary Egyptian discourses of class, kinship, and patriotism. Documentary newspaper photographs act as a discourse of emotional engagement through which the Egyptian state seeks to assimilate itself with the newspaper reading audience into a single rhetorical subject. By representing emotions visually, photojournalism engages the passions of a diffuse audience and expresses that engagement as a spontaneous unified outpouring of feeling. It becomes in effect the expressive art of the modern political order.4

Scene of the Crime

The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where the caption comes in, whereby photography turns all life's relationships into literature. . . . Is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passer-by a culprit? Is it not the task of the photographer-descendant of the augurs and haruspices-to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures? . . . Will not the caption become the most important part of the photograph?

-Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, and Other Writings

Egypt's complex media environment is influenced by a longstanding political war between the state and a number of Islamist opposition groups. In this conflict, the Egyptian government has used a number of police, political, and cultural strategies. The latter have included changes in educational and publication policy and the use of mass media to inform, persuade, and mobilize the population. Art and photography have long histories as part of Egypt's journalistic heritage (Dougherty 2000), despite changes in the way the oral, the written, and the pictorial articulate with locally particular senses of self, motivation, and knowledge. From its beginning in the 1870s, print journalism in Egypt has been harnessed for nationalist and reformist projects, as have 20th-century theater, literature, and visual arts. William Rugh (1979) lists Egypt among Middle Eastern countries possessing a "mobilization press" intended to shape public opinion and motivate collective action. Confirming this tradition in 1993, interior minister Hasan al-Alfi told a national conference of journalists that "the relationship between the police and the newspapers is strong and profound" in defending and securing the political system against threats, particularly from Islamist groups ('Abd al-Majid 1993). This is the context in which newspaper art is deployed to arouse the public through its representation of virtue and vice.

Although Middle Eastern Muslim religious, legal, and artistic practices have traditionally privileged the oral/aural over the written (Caton 1990; Messick 1993) and representational art has long been marginalized in Arabic-speaking regions of the Muslim world, visual idioms are no stranger to traditional poetic compositions or contemporary religious and political discourses. Popular perception of truth is suffused with visual idioms, and traditional culture producers use or mimic them for heightened emotional effect. During the 1970s, popular Egyptian khutaba' (preachers), such as Shaykh 'Abd al-Hamid Kishk, transformed the art of Islamic preaching by deploying a rhetoric of passionate expression meant to awaken and shape the audience's ethical sensibilities (Hirschkind 2001). They pioneered discursive techniques that relied on the audience's familiarity with the visual imagery and visualizing narrative of cinema, theater, and television newscasts. In his sermons Kishk often called on his audience to visualize dramatic scenes and led them through the action like a newsman with a camera. Admirers dubbed Kishk's technique as "the word as camera," a "rhetorical form . . . tied to modern technologies of the image" (Hirschkind 1999:133-134).5 The visual has not eclipsed the oral/aural as a mode of religious expression and understanding, but it has been incorporated within traditional discursive forms in recognition of its power and pervasiveness in contemporary popular culture.

Egyptian newspapers contain dozens of photographs, such as portraits of political leaders, columnists, obituary portraits; advertising images, paparazzi snapshots of celebrities, records of speeches and conferences, scenes of court trials, factory work, agricultural fields, local streetscapes, foreign political rallies, action shots of soccer games, and photos illustrating the occasional story of the bizarre or unusual, such as the birth of a two-headed calf or the local display of a micrographie Qur'an.6 The photographs that form the basis of this article are drawn from several weeks of coverage of a set of events that took place before and during the difficult summer of 1993.7

For a year, small militant Islamist organizations had been reigniting a fierce but sporadic war against the Egyptian government, sometimes using foreign tourists, indigenous Christians, and public figures as surrogates. In January a handful of men later dubbed "the Afghan veterans," who had been Egyptian participants in the guerilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, had launched a wave of attacks in Egypt, first against tourist buses at the Giza pyramids and then in front of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo's main square. Later they placed a bomb under a police car, and finally in late April, they ambushed Egypt's Minister of Information as he returned to his home one afternoon. This sort of attack by small armed cells, meant to drive away tourist dollars and punish government functionaries by humiliating the state and pushing it toward an anticipated political crisis, became increasingly frequent through the mid-1990s. The Afghan veterans' 19-day trial before a military court ended with a guilty verdict on May 27, 1993, and a sentence of death.

On July 16, the day before the five veterans were to be hanged, the Cairo press launched an antiterrorist media blitz to underscore the threat such groups posed to general security. Grisly full-page photo spreads of the blood-soaked bodies of victims of previous attacks, wounded and orphaned children, screaming mothers, and burning automobiles, appeared under enormous headlines announcing, "This Is Terrorism: Their Bullets Target Everyone!" (al-Jumhuriyya 1993a; al-Wafd 1993). The campaign continued through the morning after the execution, when details of the veterans' crimes, conviction, and sentencing were accompanied by mug shots of the five newly executed men. Accompanying text expressed the grim judgments of God and country:

In an application of God's Law and Revelation, punishment was carried out against five enemies of the people. They conspired in killing and sabotage. They shed the blood of the innocent. They corrupted and spoiled the very earth that God has promised as a safe haven. They wanted to frighten and alarm society and the national economy by trying to strike at tourism. They allowed what God forbade, and the court applied to them the Divine Ordinance of God and the ruling of the law. [al-Akhbar 1993a]

In death's finality the incident was meant to rest. However, just as the newspapers hit the streets early in the morning on July 18, the bodies of the executed men catalyzed fresh violence. They had been transferred from prison to a police morgue in the crowded working-class Zeinhom district of Cairo. It was Sunday, the first day of the workweek, and as the neighborhood began to stir, a taxicab stopped in front of the Zeinhom morgue and half a dozen nervous young men emerged to fan out into the street. Wearing black headbands, they clutched automatic rifles and nine-millimeter pistols with extra ammunition clips tucked in their pockets. Three of them had concealed explosives beneath their clothing.

According to one eyewitness account, they screamed "God is Great," as they opened fire on a police car in front of the morgue, hitting the building, a number of cars, and two bystanders. The confused and contradictory newspaper accounts that appeared the following day portrayed a bewildering set of accounts, in which the capture, killing, or escape of the attackers were all reported. As police pursued the young men, they were joined by the residents of Zeinhom and the neighborhood of Sayyida Zeinab nearby. Drivers, painters, deliverymen, butchers, merchants, locksmiths, restaurant owners, private guards, mechanics, and auto-body repairmen, armed with rocks, sticks, and butcher knives, all followed the fleeing youth. One of the young fugitives, probably wounded by police fire, was hit by a passing car and fell behind a parked vehicle where he began to shoot at neighborhood residents surrounding him. When his gun jammed, the local people jumped on him, beating him nearly to death. Another fugitive ran out of ammunition and was beaten unconscious by neighborhood residents, but when he was wounded by gunfire from one of his colleagues, the crowd dragged the bleeding youth to safety so they could deliver him to the police.

Two of the young militants forced their way into a taxicab and ordered the driver to head for a main highway that would whisk them out of the city. A butcher's delivery motorcycle and sidecar loaded with angry neighbors chased the taxi until it crossed the path of a police patrol car. The taxi driver slowed his vehicle and rolled out of the door, yelling for help, and the armed passengers, turning their rifle fire from the escaping driver to the police captain and his sergeant, wounded both while perforating their patrol car with bullets. One of the young men escaped into a nearby cemetery on foot. The other ran under a highway overpass where police shot him dead as he paused to remove the disguise he wore.

In the end, the Zeinhom incident resulted in the wounding of at least four civilians, including a middle-aged woman out buying bread for her daughters, a local merchant, a bus driver, and an office worker. A 17-year-old vocational school student was killed by a bullet that shattered his spine, and a handful of police and military personnel were wounded, including police Captain Ahmad al-Baltagi, who died of internal bleeding in hospital that afternoon. Of the two captured militants, one died of his wounds in police custody. The other was placed under interrogation at the hospital. The young man shot to death under the highway overpass became a mystery figure. Of the five different names local newspapers used to identify the body, the most exciting was al-Akhbar's page-one identification of the young man as 23-year-old Mustafa 'Awni Kamil, a fugitive wanted for the assassination of a State Security official in southern Egypt (a front-page photo caption in al-Ahram concurred with that identification, although the accompanying article put forward a different name). A search of the body turned up a bomb detonator, 450 Egyptian pounds, and-most significantly for my argument-a wad of illustrated newspaper articles about the executions of the Afghan veterans.

The surviving militant told police that the young men belonged to the military wing of the Jihad organization based in the southern province of Asyut and had been staging a revenge attack, wearing black headbands to signal their state of mourning for the executed veterans.8 Casing the neighborhood for two nights, they had clearly been reading the news coverage of the executions by day. The newspaper articles found in the pocket of the unidentified man had probably been part of the antiterrorism media blitz carried out in Cairo newspapers beginning the day before the execution. But even as clippings were carried on the bodies of the attackers as tangible commemoration of their fallen comrades, the intensive newspaper coverage had also helped produce the popular outrage that aroused neighborhood residents to chase, capture, and beat the young men.

The veterans' execution had triggered a chain of events in which each day was overcast by the lingering presence of the journalistic images of the day before. The attackers at Zeinhom, carrying newspaper stories in their pockets, were themselves described on Monday in stories blanketing the daily papers. Their clothing, the events of the chase, and praise for the heroism of their working-class captors were mixed with forensic details from the crime lab investigators. Capping the stories were ensembles of photographs that created a thumbnail sketch of the complicated incident: the shot-out patrol car window; the taxi used as a getaway car; faces of neighbors and pursuers; the wailing relatives of the wounded and dead gathered at the hospital; the Muhammad Ali mosque towering behind the overpass below which the body of the unidentified man was being examined by police. An inset displayed a police academy photograph of al-Baltagi, a photo of his wounded sergeant, and a close-up of the blood-streaked face of the student killed on his way to school (al-Ahram 1993a). Several photos show close-ups of the dead militant. In some, his face and torso are covered with newspapers like fresh cuts of meat. In others, these have been pulled away to show his open eyes and mouth and his shirt pulled up to reveal the blood caked on his chest. In many of these montages, photographs of the militant accompany those of the dead student or the police officer, balancing visually the acts of murder and official retribution. Victims and killers remained distinguished even in death: newspapers consistently referred to the bodies of officer and student as juthmanat (mortal remains), whereas the bodies of the dead or executed militants were referred to less politely as juthath (corpses or carcasses).

حدس می زنم که می دونم کی داره اين مقاله ها رو توی قسمت کامنتها پست می کنه!! اين آخری - مقاله ی گرگوری استرت Gregory Starett خيلی خوبه. نظرات من خيلی ازش تاثير گرفتن ولی موقع نوشتن يادم نبود اين رو بگم!!