Perception in Walter Benjamin

By Gustavo Larach

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin calls our attention to a crucial shift in the perception of works of art that took place with the coming of modernity. The translation into visual language of diverse aspects of life occurs with more speed as we go from engraving and etching to lithography, which could constantly show in printed media aspects of everyday life, and from lithography to photography, which “freed the hand from the most important artistic functions”. After these changes, the most important artistic responsibilities resided solely “upon the eye looking into a lens” (Benjamin 1969, 219). Technology allowed this accelerated advances, and it also allowed for the mechanical reproduction of works of art, permitting increasingly large numbers of people to look at copies of them.

Benjamin reflects upon the repercussions of the reproduction of works of art. He points out that what is missing in every reproduction of a work of art is “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin 1969, 220). The situations in which the reproduction actually appear does not elicit in the viewer the same sensations the actual work would; the reproduction is not able to convey all that has been transmitted by the work of art from its first appearance; the historical testimony unfolded by the work is effaced and its is authority is jeopardized. All that which is eliminated from the work of art through its reproduction Benjamin subsumes in the concept of the “aura”, and he goes on to say that “that which withers in the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (Benjamin 1969, 221). He explains how this constitutes a two fold process that goes beyond the realm of art and leads to a “shattering of tradition:”

The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced (Benjamin 1969, 221).

Benjamin argues that changes in the mode of human existence, i.e. social changes, entail changes in the mode of human sense perception, as it is historical circumstances which determine how our perception is organized and the medium in which that perception is accomplished. He declares that “if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes” (Benjamin 1969, 222). He sees the decay of the aura as closely related to the increasing significance of the popular classes, as they desire “to bring things closer spatially and humanly”, and to overcome the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. The sacrifice of the uniqueness and permanence of a work of art for its reproducibility signals a society that seeks a universal equality of things, and the adjustments this society makes regarding works of art alter the grounds of their perception.

According to Benjamin, reproducibility removes the function of the work of art from the sphere of religion. Works of art originated first in the context of ritual, and the aura cannot be separated from that ritual function. Even secular works retain the value of authenticity, which results from the uniqueness of its creators or the unique achievement embodied in the work, a perception that has been sustained by the imagination of the viewer, and in which the collector appears as a kind of fetishist who participates in the ritual power of the work of art. This condition, Benjamin argues, changes with photography. None of the prints made from a photographic negative can be regarded as the authentic one. According to Benjamin, in so far as authenticity stops to be an aspect of artistic production, the work of art is removed “from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (Benjamin 1969, 224). The way a viewer might regard a work of art is essentially altered. The suppression of the ritual value of the work allows focusing on the exhibition value of the work: the work will appear in many contexts and instances, removed from its original location and tradition and from what it originally designated. It will appeal to larger numbers of people, whose subjectivity might be unfolded upon the work of art.

If at first the ritual value was still shaping the attitudes of viewers who performed a cult of remembrance when sensing the aura in the momentary appearance of an absent one, experiencing a melancholic beauty in the photograph, this entrenchment of the ritual value is overcome by photographs like those of Eugène Atget, which show deserted streets of Paris as if they were the scene of a crime, as Benjamin describes these pictures. Atget had set out to record the old Paris, as opposed to the new, modernized aspects of it, and so there was a testimonial element to these pictures. They

become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way (Benjamin 1969, 226).

When ritual value is absent from a work, the rules for making sense out of the image are changed, and to a great extent open for the viewer to participate in the construction of meaning. The strong perspective lines of Church of St. Gervais, Paris, from c. 1900, do not lead our sight to the church referred to by the title, but to the dark passage in the far background of the picture, which so strongly draws the attention of the viewer. The space is open for the viewer to project meaning onto the image.

To this receding of the ritual value Benjamin adds the great proliferation of mechanically reproduced images that appear in the last years of the 19th century and that continued to proliferate during the first decades of the 20th. Examining these printed works we might get a sense of the process by which, according to Benjamin, reality and the public were adjusting to each other. The content of posters and magazines of the first decades of the 20th century might hint into the elements being negotiated in this adjustment, in which mechanically reproduced works played such a crucial role. Already in the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec we can sense the scope of contrasting realities that symptomatically appear in the same media and visual language.

A Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph of 1893 titled Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris advertises the debut of this dancer at a mayor café-concert on the Champs-Elysées. Another Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph from the same year, Foot of the Gallows, advertises the serialization in the magazine Le Matin of the memoirs of a chaplain who witnessed thirty-eight executions at the prison of La Roquette. Both images feature the sketchy, descriptive lines of Toulouse-Lautrec, the broad areas of solid color characteristic of lithographs, and bold typography. However, while in Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris perspective is suggested by the wooden boards of the stage, in Foot of the Gallows it is seen in the long line of mounted gendarmes that guard the execution; in one image the protagonist is a flourishing dancer, in the other a man that faces execution. Both of these images appear as part of spectacle, and it is up to the public to negotiate between them.

Benjamin seems to appreciate the increased exhibition potential made possible by reproducibility, accepting in it both ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, perhaps for the sake of the discursive possibilities of which the new media are capable, and the expansion of the field of perception allowed by mechanical reproduction. Politics had long been an important aspect of artistic production, but with mechanical reproduction more people could participate in the production of art and increasingly more viewers could accept, reject or simply examine the myriad ideas that inhabited the visual. Photographs and prints in magazines and billboards could entice viewer towards new commodities, warn them about the dangers of bolshevism, suggest to them what a nightmare the Five Year Plan would be by the fourth year, try to convince him or her of fighting the German eagle or point out how voting for Hitler will help poor families fight hunger. Benjamin finds in the crisis of bourgeois democracies the motivation of rulers to present themselves in massive spectacles that would later appear in newsreels and magazines (Benjamin 1969, 247). In a society so characterized by a great heterogeneity of conditions, opinions and forces, a discrete art object, clearly outlined from anything else in the world, locked in its own aesthetic, would no longer make sense, rather, a plane of perception is needed whose multiplicity can reflect all the aspects of the new complex reality and in which contrasting subjectivities can be confronted.

It took filmmaker Walther Ruttmann a whole year to accumulate the footage from which he assembled a 65 minute film that simulates the passage of one day. The movie, which is more a semi-documentary collection of visual impressions than a narrative, appeared in 1928 as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. The film was edited to accompany a 75 minute jazz score. Ruttmann’s idea was to make “something out of life, of creating a symphonic film out of the millions of energies that comprise the life of a big city” (DeBartolo 2001). This project illustrates how what appears in film is removed from its original temporality and its actual context in space. The recorded scenes are inserted into a sequence following criteria such as angle, direction of motion, theme, time of day, and it is this new place they now have in a cinematic sequence what informs how the scenes will be read by the viewer. They are not anymore actual events happening in real time and space, but a flickering projection appearing in front of a viewer for him or her to evaluate in social or psychological terms. Benjamin’s comparison between the painter and the cameraman is eloquent:

The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one; that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art (Benjamin 1969, 234).

In Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, incidents that were recorded separately by the camera appear juxtaposed in the film, and their proximity allows the viewer to make meaningful connections between the scenes, everything coming together in a fluid sequence that appears in the screen as the seamless flow of reality. Sequences of people having lunch alternate, some eating simple meals, some eating more fancy food; between the intervals formed by this alternation, a sequence of a lion devouring a big piece of raw meat is interspersed. A sequence of a woman begging in the street is juxtaposed with that of a woman selecting jewelry; another woman throws herself into the river and people gather to observe; she is not rescued, she drowns; another crowd surrounds a walkway and look at women as they model new fashions. The flow of events continues and everything is absorbed into the rhythm of life in the industrialized metropolis.

For Benjamin, the medium of the film induces progressive reactions, since the reaction of the individual has to be negotiated with the reaction of the whole public. At the same time, he sees the film as enriching the field of perception, and he finds that Sigmund Freud’s book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception” (Benjamin 1969, 235). He points out that the expanded perception of the visual and the acoustical in the film brings about a deeper mental perception, an introspective self consciousness. To indicate this he uses the word apperception, which comes from the French term apercevoir, which means to start to see, to discover through the action of the spirit (MEDIADICO 1998-2007).

Benjamin argues that a movie allows for an analysis that is more accurate and made from a larger number of angles than a painting could, and that filmed behavior is better prepared for analysis because the elements of the situation in which behavior come about are recorded in the film with more precision. Hidden details are seen in close-ups and commonplace milieus are explored by the camera with great intelligence; the systematic examination carried out by these images makes us aware of the necessities that govern our modern life and suggests broad fields of action that were not previously imagined. He continues his assessment of the film by saying that:

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling (Benjamin 1969, 236).

The technique of the film is to be estimated not only for its more precise penetration of reality, but also for a previously unavailable perception of space and movement, finding in the close-up an expansion of space and in slow motion an extension of movement. We are not conscious of what we do when reach for an object with our hand, but when the camera looks at this action it can isolate it, interrupt it, extend it, accelerate it, enlarge it or reduce it among other things, and in doing so reveals “entirely new formations of the subject” (Benjamin 1969, 236). According to Benjamin, the film fully implements the altered experience the Dadaists were seeking to provide in their work. In approaching an image like Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, of 1919, the viewer can’t apply same type of the aesthetic experience that would be appropriate to contemplate a Cézanne; relationships of color, solidity of form, the evocation of nature are all gone and in its place many pieces of paper have been pasted not only helping to destroy the aura in the work of art but to direct the attention of the viewer to current political issues.

If the Dada Kitchen Knife cuts into the reality of the Weimar Republic and presents to the viewer the new artistic agenda of Dada, Dziga Vetov’s film Man with a Movie Camera uses cinematic equipment to create a cinematic language distinct from that of literature and the theater, a vision that is not staged but excised from the vital flow of life in communist Russia. In this language, the Dada assault on vision is sustained as new unexpected sights are constantly chained to the unstopping flow of vision using no pre-established syntax; while the viewer is still trying to make sense of a sequence, new elements appear that complicate or empty his interpretation; the language of the film seems thus to have a proximity with life.

Different possibilities of the film seem to concern Benjamin, most obviously its use for fascist propaganda. He also is preoccupied about superficial uses of the film that might perpetuate the mechanisms of capitalism, making commodities out of actors, for example. One idea that seems to be at the center of his essay is the development of a new form of behavior towards works of art that flows out of the public. He defines it in terms of a polarity between distraction and concentration as means of coming to understand something: a person that concentrates in a work of art is a person that is absorbed by that work of art, while a person who is distracted absorbs the work of art unconsciously. As an example he cites buildings: “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction” (Benjamin 1969, 239). Buildings are appropriated in a two fold manner, he explains: use, which implies touch, and perception, which he associates with sight. Use configures the habits that largely shape optical perception, which occurs less by rapt attention than by “noticing the object in incidental fashion”. He calls this a mode of appropriation that was developed in terms of architecture but can take on a canonical significance, and he goes on to attribute it to film:

Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one (Benjamin 1969, 240-41).

Here Benjamin is discussing a mode of perception characteristic of modernity. He praised the way in which a scholar of the Vienna School of Art History, Alois Riegl, looked at works of art to shed some light upon the organization of perception during late Roman times. In Riegl’s theory, “transformations of certain highly formal characteristics of art are the result (…) of changes in the way people regard their relationship with the world” (Iversen 1993, 72). Benjamin’s close study of the transformations taking place in his own time in the modes of producing and approaching works of art, which are as radical as going from one media to another, and which involve adaptations of the media to the public and to reality, are in effect a study of the ways in which people might perceive the reality of their own modern world and cope with it.

In the first paragraph of his essay, Benjamin remembers how Karl Marx looked at the conditions that underlie capitalist production to show what could be expected in the future. Marx’s prognosis was that “one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself” (Benjamin 1969, 217). The transformations in art and culture that Benjamin described in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction entail a transformation in the superstructure that manifests changes in the conditions of production, and the concepts he elucidated in terms artistic developments point at the foundations of an artistic practice whose critical mode of perception would help induce the realization of radical change.

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