PERSPECTIVES ON WALTER BENJAMIN

Winter 1999
Volume 25, Number 2

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This essay is about looking back: looking back at the path that led to the triumphant postwar convergence of art and photography that began in the 1960s, but looking at it from this moment at the end of the twentieth century when such a "triumph" must be bracketed by the circumstance that now photography can only be viewed through the undeniable fact of its own obsolescence.1 It is as well about looking back at the theorization of this aesthetic convergence in the hands of all those poststructuralist writers who were themselves considering the historical reach of its operations by looking back at Walter Benjamin's announcement of its effect in his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." It will be significant, further, that though Benjamin's text was interpreted in all the thrust of its predictive and positive orientation to the future, his own favorite posture was that of looking back, whether in imitation of the surrealists' connection to the outmoded discards of recent history, or in the guise of Klee's Angelus Novus, who greets historical progress only by looking backwards at the storm of its destruction.

Several strands braid together, then. The first could be called photography's emergence as a theoretical object. The second could be identified as photography's destruction of the conditions of the aesthetic medium in a transformative operation that would affect all the arts. The third could be named the relationship between obsolescence and the redemptive possibilities enfolded within the outmoded itself.

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Whether it was as the prime example of Roland Barthes's mythology or of Jean Baudrillard's simulacrum, by the 1960s photography had left behind its identity as a historical or an aesthetic object to become a theoretical object instead. The perfect instance of a multiple-without-an-original, the photograph--in its structural status as copy--marked the site of so many ontological cave-ins. The burgeoning of the copy not only facilitated the quotation of the original but splintered the supposed unity of the original "itself" into nothing but a series of quotations. And, in the place of what was formerly an author, the operator of these quotes, in being redefined as pasticheur, was repositioned to the other side of the copybook to join, schizophrenically, the mass of its readers.

Barthes, in particular, was further interested in the structural irony that would allow photography, this wrecker of unitary being, to perform the semiological sleight-of-hand whereby in the seamlessness of its physical surface the photograph seemed to summon forth the great guarantor of unity--raw nature, in all its presumed wholeness and continuity--to cover the tracks of photography's own citational operations. Its participation in the structure of the trace, the index, and the stencil made photography thus the theoretical object through which to explore the reinvention of nature as "myth," the cultural production of it as a mask behind which the operations of history and of politics could be kept out of sight.2

In Baudrillard's hands this mask became the model of a final disappearance through which the object-conditions of a material world of production would be replaced by the simulacral network of their reproductions, so many images peeled off the surfaces of things to enter the circuit of commodities in their own right. If in an earlier version of commodity culture the mobility of exchange-value relentlessly replaces the embeddedness of use-value, in its latest manifestation, then, both of these yield to the phantasmagoria of Spectacle in which the commodity has become image only, thus instituting the imperious reign of pure sign-exchange.3

But photography's emergence as a theoretical object had already occurred at the hands of Benjamin in the years that elapsed between his "Little History of Photography" in 1931 and his more famous text of 1936.4 In 1931 Benjamin is still interested in the history of photography, which is to say in photography as a medium with its own traditions and its own fate. He believes the genius of the medium to be the rendering of the human subject woven into the network of its social relations. Stamped on the photographic portraits made during the first decade of the medium's existence was the aura of both a human nature settling into its own specificity--due to the length of the pose--and a social nexus exposed in terms of the intimacy of its relationships--due to the amateur status of these early practitioners (Hill, Cameron, Hugo) making portrait pictures for their circle of friends. Even in the early stages of photography's commodification, after the spread of the commercialized carte de visite, the celebration of photography's inherent technical possibilities meant that precision lenses would marry the confidence of a rising bourgeois class to the technological prowess of a new medium.

The decadence that was soon to engulf this medium was thus not just due to its having yielded to the commodity but to that commodity's having been swallowed by kitsch, which is to say, the fraudulent mask of art.5 It is artiness that erodes both the aura of this humanity and its possessor's authority, as the gum-bichromate print and the accompanying penumbral lighting betray a social class under siege. Atget's response to this artiness is to pull the plug on the portrait altogether and to produce the urban setting voided of human presence, thereby substituting, for the turn-of-the-century portrait's unconscious mise-en-scène of class murder, an eerily emptied "scene of a crime" ("WA," p. 226).

The point of Benjamin's "Little History of Photography" is, then, to welcome a contemporary return to the authenticity of photography's relation to the human subject.6 This he sees occurring either in Soviet cinema's curiously intimate rendering of the anonymous subjects of a social collective or in August Sander's submission of the individual portrait to the archival pressures of serialization.7 If he also deplores the photographer's benighted struggle to acquire aesthetic credentials "from the judgment-seat he has already overturned" ("HP," p. 000), this does not assume the radically deconstructive position Benjamin would take five years later, in which photography is not just claiming the specificity of its own (technologically inflected) medium but, in denying the values of the aesthetic itself, will cashier the very idea of the independent medium, including that of photography.

1. Art and photography first converged in the 1920s, in Soviet photomontage practices and in the dada and then surrealist integration of photography into the very heart of their movements. In this sense the postwar phenomenon is a reconvergence, although it was the first to affect the market for "high art" itself in a significant way.

2. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, 1957); trans. Annette Lavers, under the title Mythologies (New York, 1972). Barthes's theorizations of photography include "The Photographic Message" and "Rhetoric of the Image," ImageÐMusicÐText, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 15-31, 32-51, as well as "The Third Meaning," pp. 52-68, hereafter abbreviated "TM"; and Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981).

3. See Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, 1981).

4. The "Little History of Photography" was published in Literarische Welt in the September and October issues of 1931. See Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," "One Way Street" and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (New York, 1979); hereafter abbreviated "HP." Benjamin wrote a first draft of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in the fall of 1935 (completing it in December). He began to revise it in January 1936 for publication in the French edition of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (trans. Pierre Klossowski, under the title "L'Oeuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 [1936]: 40-68). Because the French version imposed various cuts in Benjamin's text, he reworked the essay again in German, this ultimate version to be published only in 1955. See Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," Schriften, ed. Theodor Adorno and Gretel Adorno, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), 1:366-405; trans. Harry Zohn, under the title "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969); hereafter abbreviated "WA."

5. Benjamin speaks of the decadence and the "falling off of taste" that overwhelms photography by the 1880s (Benjamin, "HP," p. 000).

6. Benjamin, writing after the 1929 crash, comments: "It would not be surprising if the photographic practices that today, for the first time, recall this preindustrial flowering were in subterranean relation with the crisis of industrial capitalism" (Benjamin, "HP," p. 000).

7. On the relation between Benjamin's analysis of Sander and the debates about photography engaged in by the Soviet avant-garde, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture," in Melissa E. Feldman, Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art (exhibition catalog, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 9 Sept.-30 Oct. 1994).

Rosalind E. Krauss is professor of art history at Columbia University. Her latest books are entitled Picasso Papers (1998) and Bachelors (1999).