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Romantic Phantasms: Benjamin and Adorno on the Subject of CritiqueAuthor(s): Douglas Brent McBrideSource: Monatshefte, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 465-487Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30153733 .

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Romantic Phantasms:

Benjaminand Adornoon the Subjectof Critique

DOUGLAS BRENT MCBRIDE

Indiana University

The political stakes in the modern split between high and low art werenever more clearly articulated than in the debate between WalterBenjaminand Theodor W. Adorno on popular culture. When Adorno described his

defense of autonomous art and Benjamin's apology for mass entertainmentas torn halves of one freedom, he located their dispute within a speculativetradition that invests aesthetic experience with emancipatory potential. The

origins of this discourse can be traced to Romanticism and its reflection onthe role of subjectivity in politics and art. Benjamin's dialogue with Adorno

marked animportant turning point

in this narrativeby unmasking

its twin

protagonists-the autonomous individual and its collective other-as

phantasms, figments of the Romantic imagination. By analyzing the Ro-mantic phantasms that haunted Benjamin's dialogue with Adorno, the pres-ent essay suggests how critical subjectivity might be reconsidered in an agein which the virtual reality of cyberspace has become second nature for

many individuals.The debate on popular culture is primarily documented in two es-

says-one each by Benjamin on film and Adorno on jazz-published in

successive issues of the Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung in 1936.1Both friendswere living in exile--Benjamin in Paris and Adorno in Oxford-and theletters they exchanged provide additional clues to the positions they were

elaborating. If the personal hardships of emigration influenced the tenor oftheir dispute, then contemporary events almost certainly contributed to itssense of urgency. Everywhere the new mass media seemed subject to ma-

nipulation: by totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and the USSR, and

monopolizing market forces in the USA. In the 1930s, questions of popularculture became political problems of the first order.

Adorno's primary contribution to the debate, an essay titled "OberJazz," has a relatively uncomplicated textual history.2Benjamin's contri-

bution, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbar-

Monatshefte, Vol. 90, No. 4, 1998 4650026-9271/98/0004/0465 $01.50/0

c 1998 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System



466 McBride

keit," is another story. At Benjamin's request, the essay was published in

the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung in French translation. This translation

was based on a second, revised version of the essay. After the French trans-

lation was published, Benjamin completed a second and more radical re-

vision of the German text, in the express hope that Bertolt Brecht would

have it published in Moscow.3As it turned out, none of the German versions

appeared in print until Adorno and his wife Gretel included the third ver-

sion of the essay in their two-volume edition of Benjamin's selected works,in 1955. This is the version that served as the basis for Harry Zohn's trans-

lation, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the

onlyone available in

Englishat this date. It is also the version that continues

to serve as the basis for most academic discussion of the essay, despite thefact that both earlier versions have been made available in recent decades.4

The result of all this is that there exists no one authoritative text of

Benjamin's essay, but rather three distinct documents of a work in progress.The differences that distinguish the three texts provide as much insight into

Benjamin's debate with Adorno as any one variant read in isolation. Forthis reason, all three versions will be considered in the discussion that fol-lows.

I

Adorno first identified the Romantic phantasms haunting his dialoguewith Benjamin in a letter from 18 March 1936, written to critique an un-

published manuscript of Benjamin's essay. In an attempt to mediate be-

tween their divergent views, Adorno observed that autonomous art and

popular film both bear the scars of capitalist exploitation, as well as ele-

ments of change. He did not, however, suggest that high art be privilegedover low. Instead, he insisted that neither be sacrificed to the other, since

this would mean losing the critical potential of both. Only if high and low

art are maintained in an equivalent relation of mutual negation-ratherthan being canceled in identity--can the critical power of either be sal-

vaged.

Beide tragendie Wundmaledes Kapitalismus, eide enthaltenElemente der

Veranderungfreilichnie und nimmerdas MittlerezwischenSchonbergunddem amerikanischen

ilm);beide sind die

auseinandergerissenen alftender

ganzenFreiheit,die doch aus ihnen nichtsich zusammenaddierenagt:eineder anderenzu opfernwareromantisch, ntwederals birgerlicheRomantikder Konservierung on Pers6nlichkeitund all dem Zauber,oder als anar-chistische m blindenVertrauen uf die Selbstmachtigkeites Proletariatsm

geschichtlichenVorgang-des Proletariats,das doch selberbtirgerlichpro-duziert st.5



Benjamin and Adorno on Critique 467

The twin specters of the bourgeois individual and the proletariat are

evoked here to indicate two notions ofsubjectivity

which inform two con-

trasting models of art. In a rare moment of self-irony, Adorno acknowledgesthat the debt his critical method owes to the bourgeois individual as a di-

alectical "Durchgangsinstrument" (Briefwechsel 149) makes him guilty ofthe first illusion. The irony of this admission is underlined by a direct ref-

erence to Benjamin's analysis of how the film industry manipulates the cult

of stardom to preserve "personality and its magic spell." According to

Adorno, Benjamin dispenses with the myth of the bourgeois individual onlyto fall victim to the spell of its Romantic reverse: the myth of the People

as a collective subject, invested by Nature with the moral authority andcognitive insight to critique culture. As Adorno points out, this Romantic

illusion mistakes what has been historically determined for natural law and

falsely assumes that the collective subject possesses a privileged vantage

point from which it could critique the social practices that actually produceits consciousness.

The problem identified here by Adorno recalls the one Friedrich

Schiller attempted to solve in the epistolary treatise "Uber die asthetische

Erziehung des Menschen" (1795).6 Namely, how can theory critique the

social practices that have conditioned its epistemological assumptions? Inattempting to resolve this dilemma, Schiller also confronted the Romantic

tension between liberal bourgeois individuation and democratic social in-

tegration, by reflecting on the nature of subjective agency in art and politics.Schiller begins his treatise by defining the Beautiful not as an end in itself,but rather as a means to an end. This end, he claims, is freedom. Thus, from

the outset, Schiller sets himself the task of considering aesthetic subjectivityin terms of its political utility.7

Schiller's reflection begins with his own historical context, the bloody

aftermath of the French Revolution. On the one hand, he observes, Historyseems to be presenting humanity with momentous opportunities for over-

throwing despotic rulers and making freedom the basis for political rela-tions. On the other hand, the Jacobin terror seems to have demonstrated

that when humans overturn the existing order they only enthrone a neworder more tyrannical than the first. According to Schiller, the fault for this

dilemma lies with the deterministic laws of nature, which deny humans any

experience in the exercise of subjective freedom. This conclusion results

from Schiller's mechanistic view of both nature and society, which invests

social structures with the same opacity as natural objects. As Adorno in-dicated in his letter to Benjamin, the notion that historically determinedsocial conditions are somehow "natural" is a Romantic illusion. The solu-

tion Schiller develops for the dilemma presented by his own world view

hinges on the notion of aesthetic autonomy, which he derives from Kant's

grounding of autonomous spheres of experience in subjective faculties.8



468 McBride

In spatial metaphors, Schiller maps the aesthetic as an autonomous

realm of experience beyond state control, free from ideological corruption,9the only sphere where the laws of nature and social convention do not

inhibit the flight of fiction, where the rules of play are not governed by logicor ethics. According to Schiller, propaedeutic practice in aesthetic experi-ence represents the only possibility for cracking the theory/praxis double-

bind in which the theory that critiques praxis is conditioned by the praxisit critiques. Although his letters are often read as symptomatic of German

nostalgia for the premodern cultural unity of classical Greek antiquity, it

should be emphasized that Schiller's program is entirely dependent upon

the autonomous spheres of value created by functional differentiation. Inother words, Schiller embraces the modern process of rationalization, which

Max Weber later identified as the defining characteristic of modernity, and

attempts to resolve its discursive antinomies from within.10

This reading of Schiller's text indicates obvious affinities for Adorno's

concept of autonomous art. What is often underestimated is Schiller's in-

terest in another aspect of aesthetic subjectivity,which Kant suggested when

he grounded the notion of taste in a kind of sensus communis." By appro-

priating Kant's notion of the aesthetic as a medium of socialization, Schiller

set an important precedent for Benjamin's avant-garde populism. This af-finity for Benjamin is conditioned by Schiller's account of how subjectivity

emerges through a dialectic of desire and recognition, described in the

twenty-fifth of his Briefe iiber die iisthetische Erziehung. For Schiller, the

mechanical drive of desire can only be harnessed and put to productive use

through sublimation. This process involves the ability of consciousness to

make representations of objects and distinguish itself from unmediated im-

pressions of the sensual world. According to Schiller, the aesthetic medium

of representation enables humans to distinguish self as subject from nature

as object. His ideal of aesthetic experience as a medium of socialization

represents aesthetic culture as a "blessed zone" of reconciliation, reconcil-iation of self with itself and self with others.12

Schiller's utopian ideals of subjective autonomy and intersubjective

sociability survive to haunt Benjamin's dialogue with Adorno more than a

century later. These twin ideals are the positive reverse of the negative

critique of subjective alienation and false collectivity commonly associated

with the Frankfurt School. Schiller paid a high price for his vision of uni-

versal reconciliation, when he grounded his theory in the Idealist split be-tween subject and object. As the Frankfurt School would later lament, this

split opened a gaping wound in modern civilization, pitting humanity as

subject against nature as object. Rather than nostalgically longing for a

premodern utopia, Benjamin and Adorno set their hopes in technological

progress as the only viable medium for developing critical subjectivity.





470 McBride

represents one of the major bones of contention separating Benjamin andAdorno.

An allegorical reading of this scene might interpret it as a narrative

of emancipation, representing the enlightenment and empowerment of pre-

viously disenfranchised individuals through a process of social integration.In an analysis of Kantian themes in Benjamin's essay, Rodolphe Gasch6

has observed that Benjamin's scenario imputes the mass audience in the

cinema with a kind of subjective autonomy. Gasch6's comments bear closer

examination here because they contain an ironic reference to a Romantic

phantasm he sees haunting Benjamin's narrative. "Free from all domina-

tion, this collective subject, testing against one another the success of eachindividual in dealing with shock, reflects itself into a free, independent sub-

ject that gives itself the rule, as it were."'3 The Kantian entity that "givesitself the rule" is, of course, Genius.

Genius plays a central role in the Kantian universe by freeing aesthetic

judgment from objective criteria such as classical standards, social conven-

tions, and conceptual understanding, and thereby allowing the judgment of

the Beautiful to be redefined as a purely subjective phenomenon.14 The

concept of Genius allows Kant to give the creative subject (as producer or

receiver of art) direct inspiration from Nature without any social mediation.Unconstrained by society, Genius represented the epitome of subjective

autonomy for the Romantic imagination. In the preface to his essay, Ben-

jamin distances himself from Romantic categories like Genius, which he

considers to be historically outdated and politically reactionary. What Ga-

sch6's gloss suggests is just how much Benjamin remains indebted to the

ghosts of Romanticism, despite his best intentions.

The obvious question Benjamin's scenario raises is whether the pro-cess of social recognition he portrays is critical, as he contends, or simply

affirmative. It is, in fact, Benjamin's tendency to subordinate individual con-sciousness to a collective unconscious that Adorno had in mind when he

accused his friend of Romantic anarchism. Adorno had already voiced con-

cerns about this problem in letters discussing an abstract of Benjamin'sArcades Project (Passagenwerk). Specifically, in a lengthy letter from 2-4

August 1935, Adorno criticized Benjamin's emphatic notion of collective

consciousness for resembling too closely the ideas of C.G. Jung.

Das KollektivbewuBtsein urde nur erfundenum von der wahrenObjekti-vitatund hremKorrelat,namlichder entfremdeten ubjektivitatbzulenken.An uns istes,dies"Bewuftsein"nachGesellschaftundEinzelnemdialektischzu polarisierenund aufzulisen und nicht es als bildlichesKorrelatdes Wa-rencharakters u galvanisieren.DaB im traiumendenKollektivkeine Diffe-renzenftirdie Klassenbleiben,sprichtdeutlichund warnendgenug. (Brief-wechsel141-42)




Adorno's criticisms seem to presume that Benjamin was cooperatingwith him in

elaboratinga method of

ideology critiqueaimed at

exposingfalse consciousness. As Jtirgen Habermas suggested in an influential essayof 1972, Adorno was probably deceiving himself in this assumption. In

"Bewultmachende oder rettende Kritik-die Aktualitait Walter Benja-

mins,"5 Habermas attempted to differentiate between divergent criticalmethods within the Frankfurt School. He drew a sharp distinction betweenHerbert Marcuse's notion of Critical Theory as critique of ideology, at theone extreme, and Benjamin's notion of redemptive criticism, at the other.

Whereas the former "unsettles the normative structures which keep the

consciousness of the oppressed imprisoned," the latter "commits destruc-tion only in order to transpose what is worth knowing from the medium ofthe beautiful into that of truth-and thereby to redeem it." Habermas con-

cluded by describing Benjamin's mode of redemptive criticism as a "con-

servative-revolutionary hermeneutic." The ambivalence of Habermas's

evaluation hits at the heart of the problem Adorno identified. If Benjamin'sscenario in the cinema is not intended to represent an instance of "con-

sciousness-raising," then what does he mean when he claims that the au-

dience's "critical and appreciative attitudes coincide"?

In the third version of the essay Benjamin expanded an idea that hadonly been indicated in the first two versions. This idea concerns the conceptof an "optical unconscious," formulated by analogy to Freud's theory ofunconscious drives. It is this analogy that allows Benjamin to discuss howthe "aesthetic" and "scientific" modes of evaluation meet in the new tech-

nology of film. In the essay's first two versions this section had focused onthe kind of unconscious processes at work in the mass audience viewingfilm. It seems reasonable to assume Benjamin revised this section to ap-pease Adorno, since Adorno often criticized his friend's interest in Jungian

notions of the unconscious and suggested Freudian theory as an antidote.16The original passage, with its references to Mickey Mouse as the creationof a collective dream, is more enlightening in terms of understanding Ben-

jamin's emphatic notion of collectivity.

Die amerikanischenGroteskfilmeund die Filme Disneysbewirkeneine the-

rapeutischeSprengungdes UnbewuBten. hrVorgangerst derExcentrikge-wesen. In denneuenSpielriumen,die durchden Filmentstanden,warer alsersterzu Hause: hrTrockenwohner.n diesemZusammenhang at Chaplinals historischeFigurseinenPlatz.(GS VII.1:377-78)

Benjamin anticipates this programmatic conclusion with a discussion

of how technology has created "dangerous tensions" among the urban

masses. At critical moments, these tensions begin to resemble the phenom-enon of mass psychosis. According to Benjamin, the exaggerated portrayalof sadistic violence-as occurs in an animated cartoon, for example-may



472 McBride

have the effect of vaccinating urban masses against any predisposition they

might exhibit toward sadistic phantasies and masochistic paranoia. "Den

vorzeitigen und heilsamen Ausbruch derartiger Massenpsychosen stellt das

kollektive Gelachter dar" (GS VII.1:377), he concludes.

Adorno took issue with Benjamin's emphatic notion of a collective

unconscious because it evoked the specter of a pre-critical utopia in which

the given is reconciled with itself. It is on this point of debate that Adorno-

the later critic of Enlightenment as myth-defended the Enlightenment

project of critical subjectivity against what he perceived to be nostalgia for

archaic forms of subjectivity. In letters to Benjamin, he defended the prac-tical

necessityof

maintainingindividual consciousness as a condition for

social critique, despite his reservations about the phantasmatic status of the

individual. As Adorno pointed out in the letter cited above, the social rec-

onciliation promised by a collective unconscious cannot address historicallydetermined problems, such as economic injustice. On the contrary.Its false

reconciliation erases difference and glosses over social division without

touching the historical factors that determine them.

III

In his essay on jazz, which appeared in the issue of the Zeitschriftfiir

Sozialforschung immediately following Benjamin's essay on film, Adorno

took issue with what he considered to be the misguided tendency of the

interwar Left to view mass culture as an emancipatory phenomenon. For

Adorno, the semblance of sociability in which the new forms of popularculture are packaged only serves to mask the impossibility of immediacythat results from commodified production. In particular,the conclusion that

jazz-whose popularity is based on its utility as dance music-enacts the

democratic sublation of art in life is nothing more than ideological delusion.According to Adorno, the defining characteristics of jazz-vibrato and syn-

copation-give the appearance of breaking free from formal constraints of

harmony and meter while surreptitiously reaffirming the primacy of fixed

tonal patterns and regimented time.17

In his film essay, Benjamin had emphasized how cinematic processesintroduce a measure of collectivity into the production of art. Adorno now

counters that jazz, which appears to require the creative collaboration of

composer, arranger, and improvising musicians, actually depends upon the

divisionof labor.ForAdorno,the formalstructure f jazzbecomesa cipherfor the false reconciliation of the self-alienated individual with the repres-sive social order of advanced capitalism. Nowhere are the differences sepa-

rating Benjamin and Adorno more clearly articulated than in their debate

over the social significance of Charlie Chaplin's screen creation, the woe-

fully inept "eccentric."




In a note on Chaplin related to the film essay, Benjamin wrote that

the social significance of film's technical character derives from its structural

dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, which creates the illusion of motion

from a sequence of still images. This principle allows film to mimetically

reproduce the continuity of a factory assembly line while simultaneously

exposing complex human actions as nothing more than a series of mechan-

ical gestures. It is in this context that Benjamin saw Chaplin playing an

historic role, by acting out the continuous discontinuity of mechanical re-lations.

Das ist das Neue an ChaplinsGestus:er zerfaillt ie menschlicheAusdrucks-

bewegungin eine Folge kleinster Innervationen. ede einzelne seiner Be-wegungensetzt sichaus einerFolge abgehackterBewegungsteilchenusam-men.Ob man sich anseinenGanghfilt,an die Art in der [er]sein Stockchenhandhabtoder seinen Hut liftet-es ist immerdieselberuckartigeAbfolgekleinsterBewegungen,die das Gesetz derfilmischenBilderfolge umGesetzeder menschlichenMotorikerhebt.(GS 1.3:1040)

Whereas Benjamin sees in Chaplin's eccentric a critical instrument

that illuminates the mimetic relation between mechanized (re)production

and human motor activity,Adorno appropriates Chaplin's eccentric to rep-resent the self-alienated "subject"of jazz. Adorno's allegory, patterned after

Max Weber's model of ideal types, relates the eccentric's modus vivendi to

the jazz principles of syncopation and improvisation. According to Adorno's

interpretation, the jazz subject qua eccentric is an apparent outsider who

proves in the end to be the consummate insider; a misfit who falls out of

bourgeois society only to return to the fold. In Adorno's narrative, the

eccentric's reconciliation with society is anything but a happy ending. On

the contrary; the jazz subject's final subjugation to an oppressive social or-

der is portrayed as aperverse parody of individual masochism and collectivesadism.

Dies Jazzsubjektst ungeschicktund neigt doch zur Improvisation;s stehtals Selbstderabstraktenbergeordneten nstanzgegeniberund stdochnachBeliebenauszuwechseln;s verleiht hrAusdruck,ohnesie dochdurchAus-druckzu erweichen.So ist es dialektischerArt. Da3 es selberkonventionell

vorgeformt st und bloB scheinbar ich selbergehart, zwingtso gut wie der

musikalischeAusdruckder Hot-Stellen zum Schlul3,dies Subjektsei kein"freies," yrisches,das ins Kollektiv erhobenwiirde,sondern unfrei im Ur-

sprung:Opferdes Kollektivs. ZfS 5.2:253-54)

The allegorical subject of jazz, as Adorno portrays it, is an inverse

caricature of Kantian Genius. Try as it might, the jazz subject is unable to

break free from conventional norms and attain subjective autonomy. Its

ultimate gesture of self-abnegation reaffirms the social mechanism of dis-



474 McBride

cipline, even as it inscribes its identification with the superimposed authorityon its own body, as a subsequent passage indicates.

Aus Angst fallt es heraus und opponiert;aber die Opposition,als die einesvereinzeltenIndividuums, as geradein seinerVereinzelungals bloBsozialdeterminiertes ichdarstellt,st Schein.Aus Angst gibtes dieIndividualitit-die Synkope-wieder auf,die selberbloBeAngst ist, opferteine Individua-

litait,die es nichtbesitzt,fiihltversttimmelticheinsmit der verstiimmelndenMacht undiibertragtdiese dergestaltauf sichselber,da3 es meint,zu "k6n-nen."(ZfS 5.2:256)

As this passage demonstrates, the Romantic phantasm of subjective

autonomy haunts Adorno's dystopian allegory of jazz as a nostalgic idealwhose absence speaks louder than any presence. Adorno drives home his

point about the "Mechanismus der psychischen Versttimmelung" (ZfS

5.2:239) at work in jazz by casually observing that Igor Stravinsky, a con-

temporary composer who had experimented with jazz principles, once com-

posed a ballet-The Rite of Spring-around the celebration of a humansacrifice.

In a letter from 28 May 1936, Adorno wrote Benjamin that he had

developed his critique of jazz, with its emphasis on the figure of the eccen-

tric, before reading his friend's essay on film (Briefwechsel 178). Neverthe-less, Adorno seems to have in mind Benjamin's apology for the therapeuticeffect of laughter among the audience viewing a Disney film, when he con-

demns the notion that the humorous elements in jazz might serve an eman-

cipatory function. In the jazz essay, Adorno insists that the heterogenous

aspects of jazz be seen only in light of their violent subordination to nor-

mative constraints of meter and harmony. According to Adorno's narrative,the reimposition of order in a jazz performance reflects the ambiguouslybittersweet ending in a Charlie Chaplin film.

Die Ziugedes Komischen,Grotesken,auch Analen, die dem Jazz eignen,lassen darumvon den sentimentalennie sich trennen. Sie charakterisieren

eine Subjektivitat,die gegen eine Kollektivmacht ufbegehrt,die sie dochselber "ist";darumerscheint hr Aufbegehren icherlich und wirdvon derTrommelniedergeschlagenwie die Synkopevon der Zahlzeit.(ZfS 5.2:257)

Adorno complements his analysis of how social processes are mimet-

ically reflected in the musical structure of jazz with a psychoanalytic inter-

pretation of the unconscious processes that determine its reception by a live

audience. According to Adorno, the semblance of emotional immediacythat characterizes the reception of jazz is just that, an illusion. If, as Adorno

claims, the manifest dream content of jazz is sexual intercourse, then this

surface signification must hide a deeper meaning. That deeper meaning-the latent dream content of jazz-is the impotency of the individual to

attain subjective agency within the oppressive social order of late capital-




ism. As Adorno concludes, the structure of jazz demonstrates "den Primat

der Gesellschafttiber ein

Individuum, das sich doch alsMaB

desVorgangserftihrt"(ZfS 5.2:253).

Many of the assumptions taken for granted in the jazz essay had been

elaborated by Adorno in an earlier essay, titled "Zur gesellschaftlichen

Lage der Musik," which was published in the premier issue of the Zeitschrift

fiirSozialforschung in 1932.18 n this essay Adorno concluded that the com-

modification of cultural production in late capitalism had mediated the re-

lations between mass society and popular culture to such a degree that thereconciliation of art and society no longer represented a desirable ideal.

Art can only overcome its social alienation, Adorno insisted, by abandoningits traditional relationship to society-mimetic reflection-and blindly pur-suing the formal laws unique to its particular form. In other words, art must

attain subjective autonomy through technical progress in order to reconcile

its own social alienation in the only manner possible, within itself. Accord-

ing to Adorno's model, aesthetic autonomy is not related to the originalityof the creative artist (he attributes the element of creativity to unconscious

processes), but rather results from the dialectical mediation of formal laws

and material conditions. Only if it expresses its autonomy from society can

music fulfill its potential for social critique.

Ihrfrommtes nicht, n ratlosemEntsetzenaufdie Gesellschafthinzustarren:sie erftillt hregesellschaftlicheFunktiongenauer,wenn sie in ihremeigenenMaterialund nach ihren eigenen Formgesetzendie gesellschaftlichenPro-bleme zur Darstellungbringt,welche sie bis in die innersten Zellen ihrerTechnik n sich enthalt.(ZfS 1.1/2:105)

What this early essay illuminates in the later jazz essay is the rootcause of Adorno's suspicion toward any form of popular music. In the ear-

lier essay, Adorno criticizes Stravinsky for appropriating folkloric melodiesand Hanns Eisler for elaborating workers' choruses. What unites the work

of these two composers, who could hardly be farther apart on the politicalspectrum, is the fact that they both manipulate populist modalities aimedat the collective subject of an identity politics. Whether this collective sub-

ject corresponds to the Romantic phantasm of the People, as in Stravinsky'scase, or the Marxist phantasm of the Proletariat, as in Eisler's, is of little

consequence to Adorno. The point is that both kinds of populist appealsonly affirm the collective subject's existing state of consciousness, rather

than elevating it. This is the reason Adorno considers all popular art, whichcontributes to socialization, to be reactionary.

After joining other members of the Institute in U.S. exile in 1938,Adorno continued to elaborate the ideas he had developed in previousessays, while working on what was intended to be an empirical study of

music broadcasts, financed by the American radio industry.'19n one article



476 McBride

that resulted from this project, "iDberden Fetischcharakter in der Musik

und die Regression des Hirens" (1938),20Adorno took up Benjamin's ar-

guments in the film essay and agreed that technological advances in the

production and reception of art have transformed aesthetic consciousness

and made the traditional category of taste obsolete. In contrast to Benja-min, however, Adorno expresses concern that the liquidation of the indi-

vidual as the guarantor of taste endangers the future of critical conscious-

ness. In one of his most piercing insights, Adorno recognizes the aporia in

which his dialogue with Benjamin is ending, as well as the theoretical im-

passe of his own project. After comparing his observations on music with

his friend's analysis of film, he concludes that:

Die kollektivenMichte liquidierenauchin Musikdie unrettbare ndividua-

litat,aberbloBIndividuen indfahig,ihnengegentiber, rkennend,das An-

liegen von Kollektivitatnoch zu vertreten. ZfS VII.3:355)

This is where Richard Wolin-among others-sees the friends' dis-

pute on popular culture ending in an antinomy "with no immanent pros-

pects for resolution."21Benjamin had voiced a similar opinion in more posi-tive terms after reading Adorno's jazz essay. In a letter to Adorno from 30

June 1936, he spoke of how the inner relation between his film essay and

his friend's jazz essay evidenced a "penetrating, spontaneous communica-

tion of thought." Benjamin goes on to compare their twin essays to "two

spotlights aimed at one object from opposite sides." The result of this con-

centrated reflection is that the "outlines and dimensions of contemporaryart" are brought into focus "in a totally new and much more productive

way" (Briefwechsel 190). One issue their debate brought into sharper focus

involves the way contrasting models of aesthetic and political subjectivity

determine differing evaluations of popular cultural production.In Schiller's narrative, the concept of aesthetic autonomy was articu-

lated as a realm of virtual reality in which humans with no real-world ex-

perience in freedom can practice subjective autonomy. This notion of aes-

thetic experience as a laboratory, or exercise field, functionalized aesthetic

culture as an emancipatory medium that empowers humans to assume po-litical agency in the arena of History. Schiller's political dialectic of individ-

ual liberty and social emancipation was predicated on a dialectical model

of subjectivity: subjective individuation mediated by intersubjective social-

ization. What survived from Schiller's narrative to haunt Benjamin's debatewith Adorno were the ghosts of Romantic subjectivity. Benjamin's film es-

say indicates that he liberated himself from the individual ego, only to em-

brace the mirage of a collective subject. By the same token, Adorno's essayson music evidence the futility of his attempt to salvage the ghost of bour-

geois individuality as a "dialectical instrument of transition."




IV

If the debate on popular culture seems to grind to a halt in the stale-mate pitting Adorno's fear of manipulation against Benjamin's hope for

emancipation, it also indicates an important point where their theories con-

verge and point beyond the impacted deadlock of an antinomy. The com-

mon ground which suggests a fresh point of departure is the interest Ben-

jamin and Adorno shared in technological progress. Adorno highlightedthis point of convergence in his letter from 18 March 1936, which was writ-

ten to critique Benjamin's film essay. Adorno begins by praising the way his

friend used history to critique myth in articulating the destruction of aura.

He then proceeds to suggest how this critique might be useful in alteringhumanity's relationship to technology.

Sie wissen,dab der Gegenstand"Liquidation er Kunst"seit vielen Jahrenhintermeinen iisthetischenVersuchen teht und dab die Emphase,mit derich vor allem musikalischden PrimatderTechnologievertrete,strikt n die-sem Sinne und dem IhrerZweiten Technikzu verstehen st. Und es erstaunt

michnicht,wenn wirhiernunausdrticklichine gemeinsameBasis vorfinden

[...]. (Briefwechsel 68)

Adorno's cryptic reference to Benjamin's "Second Technology" can-not be deciphered without consulting the earlier versions of Benjamin'sessay. It involves Benjamin's discussion of the distinction between what he

calls first and second technology, a topic which is briefly mentioned in the

first draft, substantially expanded in the second (which Adorno read), but

deleted altogether in the third. The fact that this passage--which Adorno

singled out for praise-was replaced in the third version by a footnote

quoting Brecht indicates that its deletion was motivated by Benjamin's de-sire to win Brecht's support for publication of the revised version. What

Adorno praised in the second version is Benjamin's utopian vision of hu-manity and nature reconciled through second technology.

Benjamin introduces the distinction between first and second tech-

nology immediately after having explicated what he considers to be a "func-tional transformation" in the character of art. This transformation involves

the shift from art's earliest economic basis in religious ritual to its modern

value as an object of exhibition. Whereas the function of auratic art was

clearly that of a magical device, it is still too early to guess what function

post-auratic art will serve, Benjamin says. Film is playing an historic role in

this functional transformation, he adds, because it is the most technologi-cally advanced of all art media. At this point, Benjamin relates the func-

tional transformation of art to a larger historical process involving the tran-

sition from first to second technology. Whereas the first technology, which

corresponded to art's ritual function, was labor-intensive, the second tech-

nology, which includes art as an object of exhibition, frees human labor.



478 McBride

Benjamin uses two examples to illustrate this distinction. While the fore-

most achievement of first technology was the human sacrifice, the greatestachievement of second technology is the remote-control aircraft.His pointis not only that first technology wastefully consumed human life, whereas

second technology emancipates it. As the first draft of Benjamin's essayindicates, the emancipatory culture of second technology also liberates

technology itself.

Diese Gesellschaft derenTechniknur erstvolligverschmolzenmit dem Ri-tual existierte]stellte den Gegenpolzu der heutigendar,deren Technikdie

emanzipiertestest. Diese emanzipierteTechnik teht nun aber derheutigen

Gesellschaftals eine zweite Naturgegeniber undzwar,wie WirtschaftskrisenundKriegebeweisen,als eine nicht minderelementarewie die derUrgesell-schaftgegebenees war.Dieser zweiten Naturgegentiber st derMensch,dersie zwar erfand aber schon langstnicht mehrmeistert,genau so auf einen

Lehrgangangewiesenwie einst vor der ersten.(GS 1.2:444)

In this first draft, Benjamin uses the notion of "second nature" to

describe how humanity has become so alienated from its own social crea-

tions-such as technology-that it begins to perceive what it has created

as "given" by nature.22 n essence, Benjamin is describing the same processof reification that can be used to explain why Schiller viewed the given stateof social relations as being somehow "natural,"as opaque and immoveableas a mountain or sea. In the first draft, Benjamin concludes this brief dis-

cussion by claiming that it is the historic mission of film to provide humans

with a medium to practice technological culture, with the express aim of

accomplishing the "human innervation" of technology (GS 1.2:445). In the

expanded discussion of this topic in the second draft, Benjamin's originalidea of technology as the object of human innervation is transformed into

the definition of revolutions as "innervations of the collective" (GS

VII.1:360).23In the second draft, Benjamin explains that second technology has its

origin in the historic moment when humanity began distancing itself from

nature through the medium of play (Spiel). Whereas the first technologyaimed at dominating nature, the second actually aims at reconciling hu-

manity and nature in harmonious play.The common prejudice against mod-

ern technology, which falsely maintains that technological culture aims at

dominating nature, results from a misunderstanding of the dialectical re-

lation of the first and second technologies. According to Benjamin, the ideathat modern technology attempts to dominate nature is actually a projectionof the first, or primitive, technology, which truly sought to dominate nature.

Die erste [Technik]hat es wirklichauf Beherrschungder Naturabgesehen;die zweite viel mehr auf ein Zusammenspiel wischender Natur und derMenschheit.Die gesellschaftlichntscheidendeFunktionderheutigenKunst




ist Eintibungn diesesZusammenspiel.nsbesonderegiltdasvomFilm.(GSVII.1:359)

Benjamin appropriates another Schillerian theme here, when he op-

poses play (Spiel) as the primary characteristic of post-auratic art to sem-

blance (Schein) as the primary characteristic of auratic art. Schiller did not

oppose the two categories, but rather emphasized the playful aspect of sem-

blance over the illusionary one, which tends to encroach upon the cognitivecategory of truth. Like Schiller, Benjamin envisions aesthetic experience as

a kind of propaedeutic that allows humans to exercise and master necessarylife skills which cannot be learned or acquired in other ways.

According to Norbert Bolz, Benjamin's analysis of the film mediumsuggests the concrete utopia of a naturalized relationship between humansand technology. Whereas Marx portrayed human workers as organs of the

capitalist machinery, Benjamin now represents technology as the organ of

human collectivity.24This idea is summed up in a tentative conclusion to

the discussion of second technology which was later stricken from the sec-ond draft: "Die technische Apparatur unserer Zeit, die fir das Individuumeine zweite Natur ist, dem Kollektivum zu seiner ersten zu machen, ist die

geschichtliche Aufgabe des Films" (GS VII.2:688). In the final version of

the second draft, this idea is reformulated in the claim that humanity mustassimilate itself to the psychic demands of modern technology if it is to

emancipate itself from its enslavement to machines. This statement is ex-

panded in a lengthy footnote in which Benjamin explicates his definition ofrevolution as the innervation of the collective.

In this footnote, Benjamin claims that the collective that learns to

appropriate the second technology will be as different in quality from all

previous forms of collectivity as the second technology is from the first.

Only if collectivity can be brought into harmony with the second technology

can humanity be reconciled with nature through play. "Diese zweite Tech-nik ist ein System, in welchem die Bewiltigung der gesellschaftlichen Ele-

mentarkrifte die Voraussetzung fiir das Spiel mit den natirlichen darstellt"

(GS VII.1:360). Benjamin's cryptic reference to "elemental social forces"

reappears in the epilog to the essay, where he sketches the grim fate thatawaits humanity if it cannot collectively appropriate the potential of mod-

ern technology. In this passage, which remained unchanged through allthree versions, Benjamin maintains that the destructiveness of modern war-

fare is proof "daB die Gesellschaft nicht reif genug war, sich die Technik zu

ihrem Organ zu machen, daB die Technik nicht ausgebildet genug war, diegesellschaftlichen Elementarkrifte zu bewliltigen" (GS I.2:507).25The pointhere is clear enough. If humanity cannot collectively make second tech-

nology its first nature, and thereby liberate technology as well as humanity,then the rebellion of enslaved technology will bring about humanity's de-struction.



480 McBride

The utopian reverse of this ominous statement is presented in thefootnote on revolution as the innervation of the collective. Here the col-

lective that makes second technology its first nature is promised its individ-

uals will attain expanded horizons of play with nature, even as second tech-

nology liberates them from enslavement to mechanical labor. According to

this passage, it is the collective mastery of second technology which facili-

tates the emancipation of individuals. The role of film in this process is

described in the programmatic statement Benjamin used to introduce the

next section in the first and second drafts, before deleting the entire dis-

cussion of second technology from the third: "Unter den gesellschaftlichen

Funktionen des Filmsist

die wichtigste,das

Gleichgewicht zwischendem

Menschen und der Apparatur herzustellen" (GS VII.1:375, Benjamin's em-

phasis).In the third version of the essay this statement is reformulated to

emphasize the process of cinematic representation, rather than the relations

of humans to machines. Nevertheless, enough of Benjamin's arguments con-

cerning technology are retained to make it clear he never intended to pro-mote the reflective formation of collective consciousness. As many recent

commentators-including Rodolphe Gasch6-seem to agree, the social

process Benjamin portrays in the cinema does not represent an instance ofmass enlightenment, but rather mass training in the sensory perception re-

quired of humans by the hardware of modern technology. Gasch6 concludes

that Benjamin represents the cinema as "a sort of exercise and training

ground for acquiring the transformed mode of perception required by mod-

ern life."26This training can only occur among masses, Benjamin explainsin the conclusion to the body of his essay, because individuals are temptedto avoid such tasks (GS 1.2:505).

This is precisely the point where Benjamin's interpretation of the new

technology becomes political, as Adorno points out in the letter from 18March 1936. Once again, Adorno sees the Romantic phantasm of the Peo-

ple as collective subject returning to haunt his dialogue with Benjamin.

Und hier freilichschligt die Debatte raschgenugin die politischeum.Dennwenn Sie die Technisierungund Entfremdungdialektisieren(mit allem

Recht),die Weltder objektiviertenSubjektivitat ber nichtebenso, so heistdas politischnichtsanderes,als dem Proletariat als dem Kinosubjekt)un-vermittelteine Leistungzutrauen,die es nach Lenins Satz andersgarnichtzustandebringenkannals durch die Theorieder Intellektuellenals der di-alektischenSubjekte,die der von Ihnen in die H611e erwiesenenSphire derKunstwerkezugeh6ren. Briefwechsel 70)

What Adorno is criticizing here is Benjamin's one-sided concept of

post-auratic art as play and its apparent dependence upon a collective sub-

ject. This concept of art also sacrifices the cognitive possibilities of aesthetic




semblance, which Adorno considers to be a decisive element in technicallyadvanced art. This is why he defends aesthetic semblance as a dialectical

antidote to Benjamin's notion of popular art as mass play. If Adorno is

correct in asserting that his friend's arguments are based on a hypostatizednotion of collectivity, then their dialogue has indeed ended in an irresolv-

able antinomy. But perhaps Adorno's insistence on the substantial character

of Benjamin's collective subject was mistaken. This is precisely what Samuel

Weber's conclusions in a recent reevaluation of Benjamin's cinematic sub-

ject suggest.

V

Weber's analysis27 akes as its point of departure the oft-cited conclu-

sion to the body of Benjamin's third draft. As Steve Giles has observed,this passage was revised along the lines of a Brechtian trope in a mannerthat could hardly have been more distasteful for Adorno.28 In the final

version, Benjamin underlines the centrality of distraction as the condition

for a mass audience to appropriate the unique form of critical judgment

grounded in its social status.

Die Rezeption n der Zerstreuung, ie sich mit wachsendemNachdruckaufallenGebietender Kunstbemerkbarmachtund dasSymptomvontiefgreifen-denVeriinderungenerApperzeptionst,hatam Film hreigentlichesUbungs-instrument. n seinerChockwirkung ommtder Film dieserRezeptionsformentgegen.Der Film draingt en Kultwertnicht nur dadurchzurtick,dab erdas Publikumn eine begutachtendeHaltungbringt,sondernauchdadurch,dab die begutachtendeHaltung m Kino Aufmerksamkeit ichteinschlieBt.Das Publikum st ein Examinator,doch ein zerstreuter. GS 1.2:505,Benja-min'semphasis.)

Benjamin places a premium on the fact that film impedes rather than

promoting contemplative reflection. This is why he praises the montage-method of film composition, which dissolves any illusion of a fixed stand-

point through jarring sensory shock. Harry Zohn translated the adjectivezerstreut as "absent-minded," but it has since become common practice to

employ the term "distracted." Most commentators point to the influence

Siegfried Kracauer's landmark analysis of the "Kult der Zerstreuung"

(1926)29must have exerted on Benjamin's essay. Weber pursues a differentpath, however, based on the way Benjamin employed the oppositional pair

Zerstreuung and Sammlung in his unsuccessful post-doctoral thesis, Ur-

sprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,30 hich was completed in 1925, althoughit was not published until 1928. As Weber points out, Benjamin's use of theterm Zerstreuung implies additional connotations which are not suggested



482 McBride

by the English equivalents 'distracted' or 'absent-minded.' This additional

field of signification evokes the spatial imagery of dispersion.As Weber explains, this alternative field is emphasized by Benjamin's

tendency to oppose the terms Zerstreuung (distraction/dispersion) and

Sammlung (contemplation/collection) in both the post-doctoral thesis and

the film essay. In the film essay, Benjamin employs a graphic figure to il-

lustrate why he places such a high priority on distraction-as opposed to

contemplation-as a condition for his unique concept of a post-Romanticnotion of critical subjectivity. In contrast to Adorno, Benjamin views bour-

geois modes of concentrated, contemplative reception, which are typically

accomplishedin

solitary isolation,as

promoting ideologicalidentification

rather than critical reflection.

Zerstreuungund Sammlung tehen in einem Gegensatz,der folgendeFor-

mulierungerlaubt:Der vor dem Kunstwerk ich Sammelndeversenkt sichdarein; rgehtin dieses Werkein,wie dieLegendees von einemchinesischenMalerbeim Anblickseines vollendetenBildes erzahlt.DagegenversenktdiezerstreuteMasse ihrerseitsdas Kunstwerk n sich. (GS 1.2:504)

Benjamin's description of how the consciousness of the contemplative

viewer is completely subordinated to the frame of the viewed work evokesthe hermeneutic ideal of empathy (Einfiihlung). The neo-Romantic ideol-

ogy of empathy attempted to overcome the Idealist split between subjectand object by demanding that the critic surrender his or her subject positionand assume one of identity with the object of contemplation, in order to

grasp its objective truth. This process of identification is characterized bythe phenomenon of immersion (Versenkung) as rapt contemplation; the

surrender of subjective autonomy to enthrallment by the object. As Ben-

jamin explains in a variant reading of this passage in the first draft of the

film essay, empathy and immersion are expressly religious modes of recep-tion typically induced by auratic works of art (GS 1.3:1044). Hence, his

peculiar use of the oppositional pair Zerstreuung and Sammlung can be

read as critiquing the ideology of empathy and presenting an alternative

strategy for establishing and maintaining critical distance.

What Weber's reading of Benjamin's film essay proposes as a defense

against the Romantic phantasms of the bourgeois individual and the Peo-

ple-each of which is prone to the delusions of 'false' consciousness-is

the dispersion of the subject function across a mass of individuals. Weber's

analysis is supported by Gaschd, who categorically states that Benjamin'scollective subject is devoid of any substantial or formal center. Accordingto Gasch6, its "heightened presence of mind" does not correspond to tra-

ditional concepts of individual or class consciousness. In fact, this point is

underlined by Benjamin's emphatic use of the term "mass" as opposed to

"class." According to Gaschd, Benjamin conceives of the "mass's state of




mind as one which is so permeable that paradoxically it cushions against all

attack."Gasch6

concludes thatBenjamin presents

the distracted behaviorand decentered focus of the mass subject of cinema as a solution to the

problems of his day.31These problems included the routinization of dailylife, which Benjamin feared was impoverishing the quality of human ex-

perience for masses of urban workers, as well as the attempts of totalitarian

regimes to manipulate psychological processes of identification in order tocreate a mass subject, with the help of the new media of reproduction.

According to Weber's reading, it is the dispersion of perspective,rather than its concentration in consciousness, which subverts the reflective

principle of identity implied in the concepts of empathy and immersion.This reading precludes the emergence of a collective subject that attains

self-consciousness, as Adorno feared. It also illuminates Benjamin's notionof film as a tool for developing the psychic mechanisms that inhibit thelocalized concentration of thought in consciousness. This is made possible

by film's montage method of juxtaposing shots, which prevents the viewerfrom assuming "any one standpoint" (GS 1.2:495). In a similar way, theaudience in the cinema cannot be assigned any fixed perspective. What

Benjamin calls a mass is nothing more than individuals who come together,

coalesce, break up, and disperse, only to be reconfigured in other combi-nations at later times and places. His alternative distinction between con-

centration and dispersion offers a basis for rethinking critical subjectivitywithin a discursive framework that is no longer bound by the individual/

society dualism of Romanticism. In a certain sense, it actually serves to

"polarize and dissolve [... .] 'consciousness' between society and the indi-vidual," as Adorno demanded, albeit not in the dialectical manner he as-sumed.

VI

Benjamin did not eradicate the Romantic paradigm of art typified bythe singular work, but he did formulate an alternative framework for ana-

lyzing the mass media as art. The key to this innovation is his emphaticembrace of technology, which he conceived as a medium of experimental

play, much like Schiller's aesthetic state. Adorno was correct to claim tech-

nological progress as a point of common interest that united the two friends,

but this does not mean their positions on art and technology were identical.As the previous discussion of their essays has shown, the semantic scope of

the German term Technikallowed the friends to use the same word to speakabout very different things. Whereas Adorno most often intends the termto mean "technique," in the sense of artistic method, Benjamin almost al-

ways uses the term to refer to "technology," as in the mechanical means of



484 McBride

(re)production. This distinction is important, because it indicates whyAdorno wanted to salvage the singular artwork as "artifice" and defended

aesthetic semblance as "artificiality,"while Benjamin reconceived art as the

media of technological (re)production. Adorno's emphasis on experimen-tation in formal technique remains consistent with a Romantic paradigm of

art. In contrast, Benjamin's focus on the hardware of technology ultimately

critiques the neo-Romantic tendency to configure aesthetic culture as the

beautiful other of ugly technology. In the film essay, Benjamin not onlyconceives technological culture as fundamentally aesthetic; he even em-

ploys the standards of technological practice to evaluate the political char-

acter of aesthetic experience.To be sure, many issues raised by Benjamin and Adorno have lost

their sense of urgency at the end of the twentieth century. One of the con-

cerns that seems most dated is the conflict between high art and mass cul-

ture, which came to a head in the debate on Modernism that split Western

Marxism in the 1930s. As Andreas Huyssen has remarked, artists have since

learned to live and work in an age in which the "Great Divide" that once

separated high and low art has ceased to be an issue-even if some critics

cling to the distinction.32 t should be pointed out that Benjamin's dialogue

with Adorno played a significant role in this process, by exorcising theghosts of Romantic subjectivity that haunted contemporary debates on art

and politics. More importantly, the central role technology played in their

dialogue provides a relevant frame for reading the debate today, when ques-tions of political and aesthetic subjectivity inevitably converge in cyber-

space.In this context, it should be recalled that Adorno's crusade to salvage

aesthetic semblance was meant to critique the illusion of immediacy pro-duced by the new mass media. Already in the 1930s, phonograph recordingand radio broadcasting made it possible to bring a "live" concert into the

privacy of one's home, but only as a very mediated kind of virtual reality.It was not long before technology triumphed over distance in an even more

convincing way, with the invention of television, which, as its name says,makes it possible to "view at a distance." What television really does-

from the perspective of the viewer-is bring distant events up close. In

other words, it has the opposite effect of auratic art, which Benjamin said

creates an illusion of distance despite the proximity required for the viewing

of traditional works of art. Benjamin's notion of the distracted or dispersedsubject shatters the illusion of immediacy created by the new media and

imposes critical distance by engulfing the virtual reality of motion pictureswithin the amorphous body of the distracted mass and thereby dispersingit. Ultimately, Benjamin's vision of technology as the collective's firstnature

questions the distinction that classifies some experiences as real and others




as virtuallyreal. At the same time, it placesone criticalconditionon themode of

reception:that it occur in

public,en masse.

Seen from the perspective of Benjamin's utopia of technology as first

nature, cyberspace appears at first glance to be a dream come true. As its

proponents claim, the ease of creating and reproducing visual and aural

representations in this medium threatens to erase the distinction separating

producers and receivers, thereby fulfilling an important condition Benjamindemanded of politically progressive art. The visual metaphor of a "net" or

"web" also evokes an interesting affinity for Benjamin's spatial distinction

between collection and dispersion as an essential aspect of critical subjec-

tivity in media culture. What seems more troubling about this medium isthe way it seems to neutralize the distinction between the public and private

spheres. Benjamin envisioned mass reception of the media in public placesas a necessary condition for dispersing the illusion of immediacy and iden-

tification, while simultaneously establishing critical distance. The question

Benjamin might ask today would concern the social character of the new

media: Does cyberspace constitute a public place? Or, as Adorno might

interject, does the solitary web voyager immerse him or herself in a virtual

reality that only creates the illusion of immediacy?

'By focusing on the problem of popular culture, the present essay considers just one

aspect of Benjamin's dialogue with Adorno. For a concise overview of the historical back-

ground to the debate, see chapter six, "Aesthetic Theory and the Critique of Mass Culture,"in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the FrankfurtSchool and the Institute

of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973) 173-218, or the section on "Wal-ter Benjamin, the Passagen-Werk, the Institute and Adorno" in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frank-

furt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT, 1994) 191-218. For an extremely concise, yet insightful summary of thetheoretical issues in the debate, see Peter Birger's essay, "Kunstsoziologische Aspekte der

Brecht-Benjamin-Adorno-Debatte der 30er Jahre," in Seminar: Literatur-und Kunstsoziolo-gie, ed. Peter Btirger (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978) 11-20.

2Originally published as Hektor Rottweiler, "Uber Jazz," Zeitschrift far Sozialfor-schung 5 (1936) 2:235-59. Adorno wrote the essay in England but had it published under a

pseudonym because he was one of the few associates of the Institute of Social Research whowas able to travel in and out of Germany at the time. Reprinted in Moments musicaux (1964)and Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 17 (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1982) 74-108.This and other essays by Adorno are henceforth cited as ZfS, according to their first appear-ance in the Zeitschrift fir Sozialforschung.

3The editors of Benjamin's collected works provide a wealth of detail on the exiledauthor's futile attempts to win Brecht's support for publication of the film essay in the German

emigr6 journal Das Wort. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften,vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann

and Hermann Schweppenhiuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974) 3:1020-28.4As the editors of Benjamin's collected works explain, only the first and third versionswere available when they included the essay in volume one in 1974. The second version, whichhad been presumed lost, was subsequently discovered in the Max Horkheimer Archive inFrankfurt a. M. and published as an addendum in volume 7 in 1989. All versions of Benjamin'sessay are henceforth cited as GS, in accordance with Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiede-mann and Hermann Schweppenhiuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-89). FirstGermanversion: GS 1.2:431-69; second German version: GS VII.1:350-84; third German version: GS



486 McBride

1.2:471-508. The first published text of the essay, "L'ceuvred'art A'dpoque de sa reproduction

m6canisbe," Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung 5 (1936) 1:40-68, has also been reprinted in GS

1.2:709-39.The

onlyavailable

Englishtranslation is "The Work of Art in the

Ageof Me-

chanical Reproduction," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:

Harcourt, Brace, World, 1968) 217-51.

5Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz

(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994) 171. This edition is hereafter cited as Briefwechsel.6Originally published in Schiller's own journal as "jber die asthetische Erziehung des

Menschen in einer Reyhe von Briefen," Die Horen 1 (1795) 1:7-48, 2:51-94, 6:45-124.

7This is clearly the objective Schiller sets for himself at the outset of his treatise. Thetext's ambiguous conclusion suggests he may have lost sight of his original objective and ended

by making aesthetic culture an end in itself, rather than a means.

8For more on the concept of autonomy and discursive differentiation in Kant and Schil-ler see the relevant chapters in Gerhard Plumpe, Asthetische Kommunikation der Moderne,

vol. 1 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993) 47-150.9Another associate of the Institute for Social Research, Herbert Marcuse, critiquedSchiller's notion of aesthetic autonomy for being duplicitous, in a textbook example of Critical

Theory. On the one hand, art's autonomy accuses a social order that is unfree. On the other

hand, this critique is blunted by the compensatory function the semblance of beauty serves in

bourgeois society. Originally published as "Uber den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur,"Zeit-

schrift fiir Sozialforschung 6 (1937) 1:54-94. Reprinted in Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt a.M.:

Suhrkamp, 1979) 186-226.

1OInReligious Rejections of the World and their Directions," Weber states that "therationalization and the conscious sublimation of man's relations to the various spheres of

values, external and internal, as well as religious and secular, have [...] pressed towards

making conscious the internal and lawful autonomy of the individual spheres; thereby letting

them drift into those tensions which remain hidden to the originally naive relation with theexternal world." From Max Weber:Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C.

Wright Mills (New York: Oxford UP, 1946) 328. JuirgenHabermas described this process offunctional differentiation as the "unfinished project of modernity" in his Adorno Prize Speechof 1980. Compare "Die Moderne-ein unvollendetes Projekt," Kleine politische Schriften I-IV (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1981) 444-64.

11mmanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt a.M.:

Suhrkamp, 1974) 224-31. (s40 "On Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis," and s41 "On the

Empirical Interest in the Beautiful.")12Fora more detailed analysis of Schiller's attempt to mediate between individual and

social subjectivity, see Anthony Seville, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings ofLessing, Kant, and Schiller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

'3Rodolphe Gasch6, "Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin's'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'," WalterBenjamin's Philosophy:Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (New York:Routledge,1994) 183-204, here 197.

14Kant241ff. (s46 "Beautiful Art is the Art of Genius.")15JiirgenHabermas, "Bewul3tmachende oder rettende Kritik-die Aktualittit Walter

Benjamins," Zur Aktualitiit Walter Benjamins, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr-

kamp, 1972) 173-223.16This claim has already been made by Miriam Hansen in "Benjamin, Cinema and

Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology'," New German Critique40 (Winter1987):179-224, here 222.

7In a recent attempt to stem a wave of revisionist interventions, Harry Cooper reas-serted that Adorno's attitudes on jazz music exemplify the "bad faith of the high-culturalfetishist." Such global denouncements of Adorno's elitism fail to take into account the morefundamental concerns about aesthetic and political subjectivity that condition his taste in mu-sic. For recent contributions to the debate on the cultural significance of Adorno's ideas on

music, see Harry Cooper, "On Uber Jazz: Replaying Adorno with the Grain," October 75

(Winter 1996):99-133; Thomas Y. Levin, "For the Record: Adorno on Music," October 55

(Winter 1990):23-47; Jamie Owen Daniel, "Introduction to Adorno's 'On Jazz'," Discourse




12 (Fall-Winter 1989-90) 1:39-44; and Robert Hullot-Kentor, "Popular Music and Adorno's'The Aging of the New Music'," Telos (Fall 1988) 77:79-94.

8Originally published as Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, "Zur gesellschaftlichen Lageder Musik," Zeitschrift ffir Sozialforschung 1 (1932) 1/2:103-24, 3:356-78. Reprinted in Ge-sammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 18 (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1984) 729-77.

9Wiggershaus 236-46.

20Originally published as T.W. Adorno, "jber den Fetischcharakter in der Musik unddie Regression des Hdrens," Zeitschriftfir Sozialforschung 7 (1938) 3:321-56. Adorno revisedthe text for Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt (1956). Reprinted in Gesammelte

Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 14 (1980) 14-50.21Richard Wolin, WalterBenjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: U

of California P, 1994) 197.22Georg Lukics drew on Marx'sanalysis of the commodity fetish to develop the concept

of "second nature." According to Lukics, when humanity becomes so alienated from its own

social creations that it sees in them the arbitrary character of natural objects, it projects theillusion of a "first nature" to serve as an ideal foil for its own self-alienation. The Frankfurt

School embraced this idea and made it a methodological staple of Critical Theory. Comparethe third chapter in Lukics' Die Theorie des Romans (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1920) and hisdiscussion of reification in Geschichte und Klassenbewufitsein (Berlin: Malik, 1923).

23 Susan Buck-Morss defines "innervation" in Benjamin's terms as "a mimetic receptionof the external world, one that is empowering, in contrast to a defensive mimetic adaptationthat protects at the price of paralyzing the organism, robbing it of its capacity of imaginationand therefore of active response," in "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Art-work Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992):3-41, here 17.

24NorbertBolz, "Einleitung: Links schreiben," WalterBenjamin: Profane Erleuchtungund rettende Kritik, ed. Norbert Bolz and Richard Faber, 2nd ed. (Wiurzburg:K6nigshausen& Neumann, 1985) 9-33, here 24.

25 Eva Geulen analyzes this passage in detail in "Zeit zur Darstellung: WalterBenjaminsDas Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," MLN 107 (April 1992)3:580-605.

26Gasch6 197.

27 amuel Weber, "Mass Mediauras, or: Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter

Benjamin," Mass Mediauras:Form, Technics,Media (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 76-107.28 Steve Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the Three-

penny Lawsuit (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997) 127. Giles's study contains two chapters that are

especially enlightening about Brecht's influence on the dialogue between Benjamin andAdorno: "Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin's Revisions to the Kunstwerk Essay" (113-31) and"Vorsprungdurch Technik? Aesthetic Modernity in Der Dreigroschenprozef3 and the Kunst-werk Essay" (133-66).

29Kracauer'sessay, "Kult der Zerstreuung: Uber die Berliner Lichtspielhauser," origi-nally appeared in the FrankfurterZeitung 70:167 (first morning edition, March 4, 1926) 1-2.

Reprinted in Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1963) 311-17.30 GS 1.1:203-430.3Gasch6 198.

32 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,Postmodernism

(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) ix.

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