Social and Cultural Philosophy - Essay Example

Social and Cultural Philosophy The political stakes in the modern split between high and low art were never more clearly articulated than in the debate between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno on popular culture. When Adorno described his defense f autonomous art and Benjamin's apology for mass entertainment as torn halves f one freedom, he located their dispute within a speculative tradition that invests aesthetic experience with emancipatory potential. The origins f this discourse can be traced to Romanticism and its reflection on the role f subjectivity in politics and art. Benjamin's dialogue with Adorno marked an important turning point in this narrative by unmasking its twin protagonists--the autonomous individual and its collective other--as phantasms, figments f the Romantic imagination. By analyzing the Romantic phantasms that haunted Benjamin's dialogue with Adorno, the present essay suggests how critical subjectivity might be reconsidered in an age in which the virtual reality f cyberspace has become second nature for many individuals. The debate on popular culture is primarily documented in two essays--one each by Benjamin on film and Adorno on jazz--published in successive issues f the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung in 1936. (Wiggershaus 191-218) Both friends were living in exile--Benjamin in Paris and Adorno in Oxford--and the letters they exchanged provide additional clues to the positions they were elaborating. If the personal hardships f emigration influenced the tenor f their dispute, then contemporary events almost certainly contributed to its sense f urgency. Everywhere the new mass media seemed subject to manipulation: by totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and the USSR, and monopolizing market forces in the USA. In the 1930s, questions f popular culture became political problems f the first order. Adorno's primary contribution to the debate, an essay titled "Uber Jazz," has a relatively uncomplicated textual history. Benjamin's contribution, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," is another story. At Benjamin's request, the essay was published in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung in French translation. This translation was based on a second, revised version f the essay. After the French translation was published, Benjamin completed a second and more radical revision f the German text, in the express hope that Bertolt Brecht would have it published in Moscow. As it turned out, none f the German versions appeared in print until Adorno and his wife Gretel included the third version f the essay in their two-volume edition f Benjamin's selected works, in 1955. This is the version that served as the basis for Harry Zohn's translation, "The Work f Art in the Age f Mechanical Reproduction," the only one available in English at this date. It is also the version that continues to serve as the basis for most academic discussion f the essay, despite the fact that both earlier versions have been made available in recent decades. (Arendt 217-51) The result f all this is that there exists no one authoritative text f Benjamin's essay, but rather three distinct documents f 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. For this reason, all three versions will be considered in the discussion that follows. Adorno first identified the Romantic phantasms haunting his dialogue with Benjamin in a letter from 18 March 1936, written to critique an unpublished manuscript f Benjamin's essay. In an attempt to mediate between their divergent views, Adorno observed that autonomous art and popular film both bear the scars f capitalist exploitation, as well as elements f change. He did not, however, suggest that high art be privileged over low. Instead, he insisted that neither be sacrificed to the other, since this would mean losing the critical potential f both. Only if high and low art are maintained in an equivalent relation f mutual negation--rather than being canceled in identity--can the critical power f either be salvaged. The twin specters f the bourgeois individual and the proletariat are evoked here to indicate two notions f subjectivity which inform two contrasting models f art. In a rare moment f self-irony, Adorno acknowledges that the debt his critical method owes to the bourgeois individual as a dialectical "Durchgangsinstrument" (Briefwechsel 149) makes him guilty f the first illusion. The irony f this admission is underlined by a direct reference to Benjamin's analysis f how the film industry manipulates the cult f stardom to preserve "personality and its magic spell." According to Adorno, Benjamin dispenses with the myth f the bourgeois individual only to fall victim to the spell f its Romantic reverse: the myth f the People as a collective subject, invested by Nature with the moral authority and cognitive 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 produce its 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). Namely, how can theory critique the social practices that have conditioned its epistemological assumptions In attempting to resolve this dilemma, Schiller also confronted the Romantic tension between liberal bourgeois individuation and democratic social integration, by reflecting on the nature f 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 f considering aesthetic subjectivity in terms f its political utility. Schiller's reflection begins with his own historical context, the bloody aftermath f the French Revolution. On the one hand, he observes, History seems to be presenting humanity with momentous opportunities for overthrowing despotic rulers and making freedom the basis for political relations. On the other hand, the Jacobin terror seems to have demonstrated that when humans overturn the existing order they only enthrone a new order more tyrannical than the first. According to Schiller, the fault for this dilemma lies with the deterministic laws f nature, which deny humans any experience in the exercise f subjective freedom. This conclusion results from Schiller's mechanistic view f both nature and society, which invests social structures with the same opacity as natural objects. As Adorno indicated in his letter to Benjamin, the notion that historically determined social conditions are somehow "natural" is a Romantic illusion. The solution Schiller develops for the dilemma presented by his own world view hinges on the notion f aesthetic autonomy, which he derives from Kant's grounding f autonomous spheres f experience in subjective faculties. In spatial metaphors, Schiller maps the aesthetic as an autonomous realm f experience beyond state control, free from ideological corruption, (Schriften 186-226) the only sphere where the laws f nature and social convention do not inhibit the flight f fiction, where the rules f play are not governed by logic or ethics. According to Schiller, propaedeutic practice in aesthetic experience represents the only possibility for cracking the theory/praxis doublebind in which the theory that critiques praxis is conditioned by the praxis it critiques. Although his letters are often read as symptomatic f German nostalgia for the premodern cultural unity f classical Greek antiquity, it should be emphasized that Schiller's program is entirely dependent upon the autonomous spheres f value created by functional differentiation. In other words, Schiller embraces the modern process f rationalization, which Max Weber later identified as the defining characteristic f modernity, and attempts to resolve its discursive antinomies from within. This reading f Schiller's text indicates obvious affinities for Adorno's concept f autonomous art. What is often underestimated is Schiller's interest in another aspect f aesthetic subjectivity, which Kant suggested when he grounded the notion f taste in a kind f sensus communis. (Kant 224-31) By appropriating Kant's notion f the aesthetic as a medium f socialization, Schiller set an important precedent for Benjamin's avant-garde populism. This affinity for Benjamin is conditioned by Schiller's account f how subjectivity emerges through a dialectic f desire and recognition, described in the twenty-fifth f his Briefe uber die asthetische Erziehung. For Schiller, the mechanical drive f desire can only be harnessed and put to productive use through sublimation. This process involves the ability f consciousness to make representations f objects and distinguish itself from unmediated impressions f the sensual world. According to Schiller, the aesthetic medium f representation enables humans to distinguish self as subject from nature as object. His ideal f aesthetic experience as a medium f socialization represents aesthetic culture as a "blessed zone" f reconciliation, reconciliation f self with itself and self with others. Schiller's utopian ideals f 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 f the negative critique f subjective alienation and false collectivity commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Schiller paid a high price for his vision f universal reconciliation, when he grounded his theory in the Idealist split between 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. All three versions f Benjamin's essay on film begin by observing that technological advances in the reproduction f art have changed the nature f artistic production. This revolution has transformed art from a work-based paradigm, in which an artwork's value is determined by its singularity, to a medium-based paradigm, in which individual works are replaced by the medium itself, as in the case f film. As Benjamin points out, no one print f a film is more valuable than any other. This revolution in the means f art (re)production has introduced a qualitative change in its reception, as well. The new mode f reception is typified by the way film distracts mass audiences with shock-like, sensory stimulation, in stark contrast to the introspective forms f reception associated with bourgeois subjectivity. Because film makes simultaneous, mass reception feasible (indeed, economically necessary), the cinema becomes a privileged site in Benjamin's narrative. It is here that a mass f subjectively alienated individuals is able to reflect itself into an apparently self-conscious, social subject. According to Benjamin, the same mass f individuals whose subjective alienation would otherwise foreclose any possibility f exercising critical judgment is raised to new heights f awareness through the spontaneous social interaction it experiences before the film screen. As this mass f individuals coalesces, it assumes a progressively oriented faculty f critique, which is grounded in its social subjectivity. The centrality f this passage is evidenced by the fact that Benjamin never altered its wording in either f his subsequent revisions. It is followed by a discussion in which Benjamin argues that the physical dimensions f a gallery or museum only aggravate the subjective alienation f individuals by inhibiting mass viewing. For this reason, the most progressive works f art in traditional media (paintings by Picasso, for example) are destined to provoke reactionary responses from subjectively alienated viewers. Benjamin then claims that if the same individuals were assembled in a mass audience before a Charlie Chaplin film, the ensuing process f auto-censorship, in which each individual checks his or her impulse to laugh against the behavior f others, enables the inchoate mass f self-alienated individuals to constitute a self-reconciled, mass subject. What remains unclear-at least at this point--is why the critical faculty f the collective subject should be inherently progressive, as Benjamin insists. In fact, this point represents one f the major bones f contention separating Benjamin and Adorno. An allegorical reading f this scene might interpret it as a narrative f emancipation, representing the enlightenment and empowerment f previously disenfranchised individuals through a process f social integration. In an analysis f Kantian themes in Benjamin's essay, Rodolphe Gasche has observed that Benjamin's scenario imputes the mass audience in the cinema with a kind f subjective autonomy. Gasche'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 domination, this collective subject, testing against one another the success f each individual in dealing with shock, reflects itself into a free, independent subject that gives itself the rule, as it were." (Gasche 183-204) The Kantian entity that "gives itself the rule" is, f course, Genius. Genius plays a central role in the Kantian universe by freeing aesthetic judgment from objective criteria such as classical standards, social conventions, and conceptual understanding, and thereby allowing the judgment f the Beautiful to be redefined as a purely subjective phenomenon. The concept f Genius allows Kant to give the creative subject (as producer or receiver f art) direct inspiration from Nature without any social mediation. Unconstrained by society, Genius represented the epitome f subjective autonomy for the Romantic imagination. In the preface to his essay, Benjamin distances himself from Romantic categories like Genius, which he considers to be historically outdated and politically reactionary. What Gasche's gloss suggests is just how much Benjamin remains indebted to the ghosts f Romanticism, despite his best intentions. The obvious question Benjamin's scenario raises is whether the process f social recognition he portrays is critical, as he contends, or simply affirmative. It is, in fact, Benjamin's tendency to subordinate individual consciousness to a collective unconscious that Adorno had in mind when he accused his friend f Romantic anarchism. Adorno had already voiced concerns about this problem in letters discussing an abstract f Benjamin's Arcades Project (Passagenwerk). Specifically, in a lengthy letter from 2-4 August 1935, Adorno criticized Benjamin's emphatic notion f collective consciousness for resembling too closely the ideas f C.G. Jung. Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Harry Zohn "The Work f Art in the Age f Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1968) 217-51. Gasche, Rodolphe, "Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin's 'The Work f Art in the Age f Mechanical Reproduction'," Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (New York: Routledge, 1994) 183-204, here 197. Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974) 224-31. Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979) 186-226. Wiggershaus, Rolf, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1994) 191-218 Read More