Room-for-play: Benjamin's gamble with cinema

October

Volumn , Issue 109, 2004, Pages 3-45

  Hansen, Miriam Bratu ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34548333333     PISSN: 01622870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0162287041886511     Document Type: Review

References (119)

1. Peter Wollen, "Detroit: Capital of the Twentieth Century," lecture presented at the centennial symposium on Walter Benjamin, Wayne State University, Detroit, April 1992; earlier versions of this text, "Cinema/Americanism/the Robot," appeared in New Formations 2 (1989)
2. and Modernity and Mass Culture, ed. James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)
3. also reprinted in Wollen, Raiding the Icebox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
4. "L'oeuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5, no. 1 (1936), pp. 40-68
5. reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rudolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 1 (1974), pp. 709-39. Hereafter cited in the text as GS. This volume (pp. 431-49) also contains the first (handwritten) version of the essay which Benjamin composed during the autumn of 1935
6. See letter to Margarete Steffin, March 4, 1936, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, vol. δ (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 254-55
7. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (1975), trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), pp. 202, 207
8. Bertolt Brecht, Journals, ed. John Willett, trans. Hugh Rorrison (London: Methuen, 1993), p. 10
9. For further material on the essay's reception and publication history, see the editors' commentary in Benjamin, GS 7, pp. 982-1028, esp. pp. 1024ff
10. also see Werner Fuld, Walter Benjamin: Zwischen den Stühlen: Eine Biographie (Munich: Hanser, 1979), pp. 260-61
11. See Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 127-34; the editor's notes refer the reader to the second version of the essay
12. On Benjamin's modes of theorizing, see Theodor W. Adorno, "Erinnerungen," in Adorno, Über Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964; 1990), p. 83
13. Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit: Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997) and
14. and Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, Benjamins Begriffe, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), editors' preface
15. "On the Mimetic Faculty" (1933), SW 2, pp. 720-22
16. Jeffrey Mehlman, Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 5
17. Also see Adorno's remarks on children's play, obviously inspired by Benjamin, in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 228
18. 2, 20). Hereafter cited in the text as AP
19. On the significance of children's play for Benjamin's theory of cognition and approach to history, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 261-75
20. On Benjamin's theory of experience, see Marleen Stoessel, Aura: Das Vergessene Menschliche: Zu Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1983)
21. Martin Jay, "Experience without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel" (1993), reprinted in Jay, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)
22. Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992), pp. 3-41
23. Benjamin's characterization of the nineteenth century's reception of technology as failed, miscarried, or bungled [verunglückt] appears in "Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian" (1937), SW3, p. 266
24. Benjamin, "Short Shadows," subheading "Gambling" (Spiel), SW 2, p. 700
25. Benjamin, "Madame Ariane: Second Courtyard on the Left," One Way Street, SW 1, p. 483 (emphasis added)
26. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955; Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)
27. Eugen Fink, Oase des Glücks: Gedanken zu einer Ontologie des Spiels (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1957)
28. Eugen Fink, Spiel als Weltsymbol (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960)
29. For a discussion of play theory in aesthetic and literary theory, see Mihai Spariosu, Literature, Play, Mimesis (Tübingen: Narr, 1982)
30. For an attempt to introduce Derrida's concept of play into film theory, see Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989)
31. Finally, for a brilliant interrelation of sociological, philosophical, literary, and aesthetic perspectives on play, see Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)
32. See Kevin Newmark, "Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of laughter," in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 236-55, esp. pp. 236-41
33. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans, and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth, 1955), p. 12
34. See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), ch. 3
35. and the critique of Caruth's reading of Freud in Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), ch. 7
36. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1950; Boston: Beacon, 1955)
37. For a critique of both studies, see Jacques Ehrman, "Homo ludens revisited," trans. Cathy and Phil Lewis, Yale French Studies 41 (1968), pp. 31-57
38. see also Spariosu, Literature, Mimesis and Play, pp. 35-40
39. Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, p. 55
40. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pp. 7-10
41. Hollier's "Foreword: Collage," p. 21
42. and Hans Maier, Der Zeitgenosse Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt a.M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1992), p. 66
43. See also Michael Weingrad, "The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research," New German Critique 84 (Fall 2001), pp. 129-61
44. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament" (1927), in Mass Ornament, p. 75
45. and Michael Opitz, "Ähnlichkeit," in Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 1, pp. 15-19
46. Michael Taussig reanimates Benjamin's concern with the mimetic from an anthropological perspective; see his Mimesis and Alterily: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993)
47. and The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992)
48. "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1929), SW 2, p. 217
49. see also The Arcades Project, Convolute ρ [Anthropological Materialism, History of Sects], pp. 807-17
50. and the discussion of French and German versions of that tradition (W8,1), p. 633. On the significance of "anthropological materialism" in Benjamin's work, see Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin (New York: Campus, 1991), ch. 6
51. see also Burkhardt Lindner, "Benjamins Aurakonzeption: Anthropologie und Technik, Bild und Text," in Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940: Zum 100. Geburtstag, ed. Uwe Steiner (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 217-48
52. and Lindner, "Zeit und Glück: Phantasmagorien des Spielraums," Benjamin Studies 1: Perception and Experience in Modernity, ed. Helga Geyer-Ryan et al. (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2002), pp. 127-44
53. On the significance of this distinction, particularly in conjunction with technology, for Benjamin's understanding of the political, see Uwe Steiner, "The True Politician: Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Political," New German Critique 83 (Spring-Summer 2001), pp. 43-88
54. See also Beatrice Hanssen, Waller Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
55. I have retained a literal translation of the German proverb, Einmal ist keinmal, not only because of its pairing with Ein für allemal, but also because of Benjamin's fascination with the phrase; see his short piece "Einmal ist keinmal" (1932), GS 4, pp. 433-34
56. See also Lindner, "Zeit und Glück," pp. 137-40
57. On Benjamin's reception of biomechanics, see Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema," pp. 317-18
58. See also Hansen, "Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney," South Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 27-61; 47
59. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, esp. chs. 5 and 8
60. Irving Wohlfarth, "Re-Fusing Theology: Some First Responses to Waller Benjamin's Arcades Project," New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986), pp. 3-24
61. Peter Osborne, "Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin's Politics of Time," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and P. Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 59-109
62. for his defense of Potemkin see "Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz," SW 2, pp. 16-19
63. The last phrase no doubt assimilates the Surrealists to the messianic tradition. Here as else-where, Benjamin "superimposes," in Irving Wohlfarth's words, "two opposing actualities - historical and theological - on one another"; see "The Measure of the Possible, the Weight of the Real and the Heat of the Moment: Benjamin's Actuality Today," in The Actuality of Waller Benjamin, ed. Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), pp. 13-39
64. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version" (1939), SW 4, p. 269
65. see Anson Rabinbach, "Introduction," The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940, ed. G. Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. vii-xxxviii
66. On the significance of Kafka for Benjamin's notion of self-alienation, see ibid., pp. xxx-xxxii, and Hansen, "Of Mice and Ducks," pp. 44-46
67. On literary Jewish gnosticism, specifically Kafka, see Harold Bloom, The Strong Light of the Canonical: Kafka, Freud and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture and Thought (New York: City College, 1987), pp. 1-25
68. Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 172
69. Also see Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing. "Chaplin rescued the capacity for experience by mimicking the fragmentation that threatened it" (p. 269)
70. For a different reading of Chaplin, see Tom McCall, "The Dynamite of a Tenth of a Second': Benjamin's Revolutionary Messianism in Silent Film Comedy," Benjamin's Ghosts, pp. 74-94; p. 85
71. Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 55
72. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: MacMillan, 1911)
73. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, vol. 18, pp. 35-36; 38-41
74. See Giorgio Agamben, "Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption" (1982), in Potentialities: Collected Essdays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 138-59, esp. p. 155f
75. In addition to the The Arcades Project, especially Convolutes B, D, and J, see the condensed version of Benjamin's late reflections on repetition in "Central Park" (1939), SU 4, pp. 161-99, esp. p. 184
76. On that passage in particular, see Irving Wohlfarth, "Walter Benjamin's Image of Interpretation," New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 70-98, esp. pp. 79-82
77. Also see Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 97-109
78. Osborne, "Small-scale Victories," pp. 83-84
79. and Lindner, "Zeit und Glück." Gilles Deleuze develops his concept of repetition with recourse to Proust in Repetition and Difference (1968), trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 17, 84-85, 122-26 and passim
80. On Benjamin's concept of Ähnlichkeit, resemblance or similarity, see Opitz, "Ähnlichkeit," and Weigel, Body- and Image-Space, ch. 8 and passim, as well as Entstellte Ähnlichkeit: Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997)
81. On Kierkegaard, see Heike Klippel, "Wiederholung, Reproduktion und Kino," Frauen und Film 63 (2002), pp. 84-94
82. See Hansen, "Of Mice and Ducks," pp. 41ff. See also Lawrence Rickels, The Case of California (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 51-52
83. and the more recent survey by Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 104-7
84. A first systematic comparison of the two essays can be found in Jürgen Habermas, "Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin" (1972), trans. Philip Brewster and Carl Howard Bücher, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 30-59
85. Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture," in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 115
86. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 187
87. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Utters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), in particular letters 14 and 15
88. Eros and Civilization, pp. 88, 189, 193
89. Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modem Technology," in Technology, War and Fascism, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 39-65; 49, 56. Drawing on Lewis Mumford and Thorstein Veblen, Marcuse's critique of technology is motivated rather more by the "terroristic technocracy" of the National Socialists than by American industrial capitalism, in contrast with Horkheimer and Adorno, whose critique of instrumental (scientifically, technologically based) rationality in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) includes and draws certain parallels between both
90. "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," pp. 63-64
91. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 48
92. Also see Hauke Brunkhorst and Gertrud Koch, Marcuse zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1987), pp. 16, 18
93. More precisely put, Marcuse subsumes all technologically mediated aesthetic practice under its capitalist form, the "commercial unification of business and beauty, exploitation and pleasure" (p. 32), or the absorption and neutralization of the desublimating negativity of "black music" by "the market" (pp. 46-47). On the significance of cinema and moviegoing for the Surrealists, see, to begin with, Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1978)
94. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans., ed., and introduced by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 100. Hereafter cited in the text as AT
95. Martin Jay, "Taking on the Stigma of the Inauthentic: Adorno's Critique of Genuineness," unpublished manuscript, p. 4
96. Adorno, letter of March 18, 1936, Complete Correspondence, p. 131
97. See Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar" (February 1933) and "Mimetic Faculty" (September 1933), SW 2, pp. 694-98; 720 - 22
98. Taussig, Nervous System, pp. 143-48
99. See Opitz, "Ähnlichkeit," pp. 31-41
100. and Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit 9-10
101. On Benjamin's theory of reading, also see Irving Wohlfarth, "'Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen': Walter Benjamin's Theorie des Lesens," in Steiner, ed., Walter Benjamin, pp. 296-344
102. Kracauer, "Photography," pp. 62-63
103. The technologically based disjunction between storage and release allows for an unconscious element to enter at two levels, the moment of inscription and the time of reading. In the case of the photograph, this disjunction may involve an uncanny sense of futurity (as in Benjamin's example of the wedding picture of the photographer Dauthendey and his wife who was to commit suicide after the birth of their sixth child) - something that was not visible or knowablc at the time speaks to the later beholder of his own form of death (one, however, that Benjamin had been contemplating quite intensely during the period [1931-32] in which he wrote the "Little History of Photography"; see Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin [Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985], pp. 96-100)
104. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 16
105. Also see Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Centering, respectively, on Charles S. Pcirce and on André Bazin, both these studies offer the most thorough and illuminating discussion to date of indexicality in the context of film and the photographic media
106. On Epstein's version of the mimetic (physiognomic, animistic) potential of film, elucidated with recourse to Wittgenstein's concept of "aspect-dawning," see Malcolm Turvey, "Jean Epstein's Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye," October 83 (Winter 1998), pp. 25-50
107. See, for instance, William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), esp. ch. 4
108. On "compositing," see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 136-60
109. see also Thomas Elsaesser, "Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time," in Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann, eds., Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), pp. 201-22
110. For dissenting positions, see Rosen, Change Mummified, ch. 8
111. and Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, ch. 7
112. Elsaesser, "Digital Cinema," pp. 208-09
113. The latest example - and nadir - of this genre is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael J. Marrinan, eds., Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)
114. and Eric Smoodin, ed., Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom (New-York: Routledge, 1994)
115. See Eisenstein's critical remarks about "the crude naturalism" of the landscapes in Bambi, against the background of his enormous enthusiasm for earlier Disney films, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (New York: Methuen, 1988), p. 99
116. Gillian Rose, "Walter Benjamin-Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism," New Formations 20 (Summer 1993), p. 75
117. On the antinomic structure of Benjamin's thinking see, in particular, Anson Rabinbach, "Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch, and Modern German-Jewish Messianism," New German Critique 34 (Summer 1985), pp. 78-124
118. and John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
119. Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London: Routledge, 2000), esp. ch. 8