Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8042/1/359

The Concept of "Aura" and the Question of Art in Althusser, Benjamin and Greenberg

By Gary Tedman
Archives - Dates and Topics 2009 online headlines for February/March 2009 click here for related stories: science

1-28-09, 10:33 am


I think we should not expect Marxism to produce a scientific (correct) theory of art, which would be like a Marxist theory of biology attempting to replace Darwinism. Instead, the theory must come from within the realms of art and be "internal" to that gamut of practices. Of course, Marxism has an input to make on this subject, and, in the absence of a universally accepted theory, it is obliged to take a position on art, to pick a side, so to speak. It is also obliged to champion those theories of art it thinks are the most progressive and scientific. I am not convinced that Marxism has done this in the past at all times.

The Marxists Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg have, I would argue, produced the most progressive theories of art, sometimes almost as an aside to their more pressing concerns. This essay critiques their contributions and also seeks to amalgamate them into a new and radical whole.

It will help us to start this investigation by thinking of visual art as visual philosophy. Art, if it is not simply decorative, entertainment, or utilitarian, communicates deep and fundamental ideas, just like philosophy. I realize, of course, that “What is philosophy?” is no easy question. The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) has, however, made it an easier one for us. For Althusser, philosophy is class struggle in the field of theory. It battles over the status of the sciences. Thus, the practice of science is distinguished from the practice of ideology. Art, however, differs from philosophy in that, while philosophy (at least as commonly understood) deals with the rational via writing, art specializes in “feelings,” taking feeling to mean both emotion and sensory perception, using its materials in subtle ways to affect the senses.

Linking art and philosophy in this way has the benefit of revealing a hitherto hidden aspect of art: As Althusser said, all philosophy interpellates us as subjects. The same can be said about art. “Interpellation" is a concept Althusser developed in his theory of ideology. For Althusser, ideology (even a system of false ideas such as bourgeois ideology) participates in the ongoing reproduction of the already existing social conditions of production. "As any child knows," Althusser said, all societies must reproduce themselves. Ideology is necessary in order to reproduce the "right kind" of human subject with the "right kind" of "mentality" for functioning properly in capitalist society. The bourgeois state has organized modern education to manage this task, a task which once had been the function of religious institutions. Part of this reproduction process is the “interpellation of the subject.” Althusser’s example is the French police way of hailing: “Hey you there!” Such hailing functions so that the subject recognizes he or she really is a "responsible individual" subject to ideology.

For Althusser, the ruling philosophy always interpellates subjects, it always has a particular "world view," and it hails its subjects to recognize its authority. However, all interpellation by the state must be "materialized." It can never just consist of "pure ideas" floating from one brain to another. It must therefore exist in actual practice. We "act out" ideology, or to put it another way, because practice always comes before theory, ideology legitimizes practices that already exist (e.g., ideology legitimated the Iraq war after the war had already been started).

But, as Althusser said, bourgeois philosophy “lives by its denegation," the promise of an objective knowledge of what philosophy is, as a practice, which is offered by Marxism, is always denegated, or disavowed, by bourgeois philosophers, who assert that such knowledge is impossible. This denial of status is crucial to the ruling ideology. The bourgeois world view, for example, sees itself as just because it is universal, which means beyond all partisan positions. Because of this it may/can be forceful, resort to violence, etc.

The professional art teacher is similarly obliged to deny real knowledge of their practice. The phrase "there's no accounting for taste" is one of the unwritten commandments of modern art education. This reflects the bourgeois notion that art (ultimately) cannot "be scientific" or subjected to scientific analysis. In this, the ruling philosophy has decided what science and art is, but at the same time (absurdly) it holds there can be no definite (scientific) knowledge of it. It also asserts this of its own practice of philosophy. According to the ruling philosophy, we cannot know what philosophy does, as a practice. All of this is a function of the classical "bifurcation thesis," the great separation of the humanities from the sciences, which runs through all modern western education. The bifurcation thesis functions on the basis of the common ideology; it is simply asserted (unproven) by that ideology.

The theorist who in the modern period really began to pick apart this assertion in relation to art was Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), especially in his essay "The Author as Producer." While, for Althusser, ideology takes part in social reproduction by creating "suitably subjected subjects," this was a process largely envisaged as taking place in domain ideology. Even though he describes ideology as existing in material practices, these practices are defined by Althusser with an emphasis on the ideological.

Benjamin takes over aesthetically where Althusser leaves off ideologically by considering the material (aesthetic) form of the interpellation, i.e. the sensual mediation of the idea. Certainly, Althusser did this too when he wrote (relatively briefly) about art, Brecht, and the theatre, against the aesthetic of "myths and drugs," as he put it, but Benjamin is a more detailed and, I suggest, gets us further.

Benjamin, at the time of his writing, was bemoaning the rise of Neo-Kantian philosophical aesthetics (as opposed to Marxian materialism), and demonstrated its revival in the practice of contemporary leftist art. He put forward his theory against positions that he felt were then, in the 1930s, dominant, "Activism" and the "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit).

Activism promoted a classless notion of "common sense" and defended, according to Benjamin, the "indefinable attitude" of "men of mind," referring to their placing all of the emphasis on a metaphysical notion of content understood as entirely separate from the process of language use. Benjamin opposed the Lukacsian theory of art, and any dramaturgy that based its principles on a notion of tragedy which perceived the dramatic hero as the proponent of will in a conflict between two mutually exclusive ethical demands. He criticized, on this basis, those whom he saw as undergoing a revolutionary development only in terms of mentality, without at the same time being able to think through the question of their own work, its technique, and its relationship to the means of production.

He thought that these movements functioned (however revolutionary they may have seemed) in a counter-revolutionary way as long as artists experienced solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind, and not as material producers. Instead of asking what the position of an artwork was vis-à-vis the production relations of its time – does it underwrite these relations, is it reactionary, or does it aspire to overthrow them? – Benjamin said we should rather ask the question: What is the artwork's position within the relations of production? He argued that this way of looking at art would make artistic products accessible to immediate materialist social analysis, the concept of technique being the dialectical starting-point from which the "sterile dichotomy" of form and content could be overcome.

For Benjamin, this was a better way to determine the relationship between an artwork's political tendency and its quality. If a correct political tendency in a work of art includes its literary (artistic) quality, then its literary (artistic) tendency should consist in a progressive development of technique. His example is Brecht's "art of thinking inside other people's heads." (We should note here that, according to Warren Montag, Althusser also came to this conclusion at one point ). Benjamin argues that Brecht's method allowed the process of drama to become transparent to the spectator: that in order to make the sensory transactions accountable, Brecht had developed just such a "productive aesthetic" – for example, the well known "alienation effect" (not to be confused with Marx's concept of alienation) was a sensual technique of this aesthetic.

However Benjamin seems to diverge from this theory when we come to his far more influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Harrison, 2005). This difference is worth examining because of the latter essay’s standing in the field of art and art history/criticism.

In this essay, Benjamin has been interpreted as saying that the new capitalist production relations and the new forces of artistic production within it, such as photography and film, overcome the above-mentioned limitations by (we must presume) the fact of their mass reproducibility – because mass reproduction removes the so-called "aura" of the traditional work of art. Of course, Benjamin's concept of "aura" is usually taken as referring to a politically undesirable thing by the left, given that it can imply a precious, unique, "elitist" quality, but the background of his thesis derives here from a particular, and relatively traditional, view of art history.

It has often been stated in the literature that previously art was religious and that it is only now with modern production that it has become political. Benjamin seems to legitimate this view in his "Work of Art” essay of a radical shift from the previous conditions of art production. I submit, however, using as an example Althusser's theory of how modern education as part of the ideological state apparatus (which deals with the reproduction of ideas) emerged from a feudal background. Althusser contends that art, although definitely located in religious culture, was even in its feudal past political, not least because religion itself was a political force responsible for the maintenance of class order. The change in the mode of production does not alter this aspect.

Put bluntly, Benjamin does not seem to acknowledge this function of religious art, and therefore makes the modern condition of art too radically distinct from past class relations. One consequence of this is that his idea that the art of the past did not have a mass audience (as the art of modern reproduction does) is overstressed. In fact, art produced by the old guild system could often be seen by large audiences and even be paraded in the streets. Also, its method of production was often not individual but workshop-based, so that many artists, including apprentices, would work on a single painting. This is not so dissimilar from, say, today's film production, but, ironically perhaps, today's celebrity artists are actually less likely to work together this way.

Benjamin’s position also assumes that art needs a mass audience immediately to have a "mass effect," a position which ought not to be simply taken for granted. Great works of art may achieve their mass effect instead by permeating culture slowly, but nevertheless more thoroughly than lesser works, in the passage of time. There are of course many examples of this that we can experience right now in the museums, and this is, of course, a tacit acknowledgment that art has this exact function, in time.

Benjamin's other key idea in "The Work of Art” essay, that traditional art has an aura because of its provenance as a unique object in time, may perhaps be considered a progressive, material, aura. By progressive I mean that provenance is always involves a material object being subject to the unique moment in which it was materially constructed, as well as with the material processes that affect it in its subsequent history – all of which are aspects revealed by the object (when studied closely). Thus, even if a work of art is reproduced exactly, it is difficult to fake provenance. Time cannot be repeated.

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If this interpretation is correct, the sharp contrast, which is often implied, between the new "anti-aura" and the feudal tradition with its religious "pro-aura," is erroneous. All "good works of art," considered as such within the framework of the new capitalist production relations at the close of the feudal period, tended to be newly defined in terms of a "reactionary" aura whatever their technical means. This was, we must assume, because of the new bourgeois humanist ideology and the new practices (exploitation, expropriation, wage slavery) it validated for that/the new ruling class. There was perhaps only a relatively slow shift in terms of the aura, just as the Reformation was a process that represented a slow shift in religious sensibility.

Today there are merely different institutions (aesthetic state apparatuses), such as schools, museums, and galleries, for art. And it was and is not something unique to the new technologies promoted in and through these institutions to act against aura. The simple fact of being inherently reproducible is no guarantor against reactionary aura. Indeed we must point out that photography and film today do not generally (exceptions exist of course) go against aura; in fact, they are invariably treated as having the most intense aura of all artworks. The aura they do have, however, is not exclusively found in the uniqueness of the material object itself (the "original film," although there is of course the "director's cut"), but is also due to the uniqueness of the author "showing up" in the work (a la "auteur theory"). But this is little different from the same attitude as in regard to a "traditional" painting (although certainly the traditional Christian attitude towards the artwork may have been actually less directly associating religious values with the individual artist’s particular genius).

We can now accept that if the aura of the traditional work of art was once related to its religious context, this was because it was meant to impress the illiterate and had a hypnoidal function (that is, if there was no subversion of this by the artist), adding to the special atmosphere of the church/temple. For example, traditional stained glass windows in typical European churches provided Christian narratives using light; this was their "special effect." Is this hypnoidal effect, this aura, something that modern mass reproducible artworks lack? Hardly. Today, film and video are perhaps the most hypnoidal of all media, given that, to induce this state in a subject, the classic ruse is to use a "fixed moving point," such as the typical glowing TV/video image.

Today we have Microsoft Windows taking the place of the old stained glass windows. As "windows," we see they still glow with an "inner light." The only difference is we now invariably have these little "temples" at home, where they can more easily probe us and know our "preferences." In a sense, they watch us far more closely than Big Brother ever could in Orwell’s “1984”; they are the new temple and oracle rolled into one.

Thus we can see that there are at least two kinds of aura, and two ways we can treat this concept-term. Iona Singh has shown how the apparent aura of great works of art by Vermeer ("Vermeer, Materialism, and the Transcendental in Art," in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 16 no. 3) is in fact its superior physical/sensual properties, made by an artist with great skill with materials, and it is this 'sensual aura' that is actually misrepresented by bourgeois critics who wish to salvage these great works for their 'normal' hypnoidal aura. Yet, at the same time, we see that there are traditional artworks that do have aura in precisely the negative sense, in that they use their technical means almost solely for purposes of heightening illusion at the service of mystical ideas. So, while an original traditional artwork (say, a painting) may have aura due to its unique provenance and its expert technical qualities, the new media also has this same aura, and also its own provenance as a material object. It cannot avoid this because there is always the original (even with mass reproduction and even with the Internet). Hence today, art film and photography have just as much, or as little, aura as traditional paintings by old masters, and in terms of artistic technique have the potential to hide the sensual-material transactions between the spectator and the artwork to a far greater extent because of the greater technical possibilities that exist today for illusion.

Benjamin's 'The Work of Art” essay has often been taken as the modern left’s justification for many recent kinds of 'new technological' but still narrative art, art that, in effect, still suffers from the same problems his other, more radical, essay attacked (this seems to be a peculiar contradiction in Benjamin's work). Today, mere use of new technology plus a loosely critical narrative, destined to find sympathy with a liberal outlook, is perhaps the equivalent to Benjamin’s "new objectivity." Ironically, however, because of the way Benjamin legitimates its use, this narrative technique becomes the ground on which today's progressive art invariably avoids the scientific question. For Benjamin, it seems to enough to be progressively tendentious and to use new technology, which then stands for "new technique." Although I have no wish to single out any artist, the contemporary work of Bill Viola comes to mind here, with his use of large video plasma screens showing figurative and highly illusionary, emotional, narrative artworks. His exhibition “The Passions” at the National Gallery London (22-10-03 to 04-01-04) was in a darkened room and the entire effect was hypnoidal.

Such emotionalist art always verges on being sophisticated kitsch. It has all the attributes of kitsch: it is highly illusionistic, sentimental and reliant on fancy new technology; but while I criticize, we should also note that Viola is a very professional artist and has genuine expertise, which it would be a mistake to dismiss as simply "low."

In his famous defense of ‘high’ modern abstract art against the forces of populist kitsch, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Clement Greenberg wondered how we could possibly account for "high art" alongside "low" culture, given they are so different. In his essay, Greenberg deals with a problem that Benjamin (in the essays I have mentioned above) only approaches indirectly: the accusation of elitism against advanced art technique, or in other words against avant-garde art. Certainly, it can be inferred that Benjamin’s concept of the diminishing of aura by mass reproduction is simultaneously an attack on elitism.

For the Marxian Clement Greenberg of 1939, his understanding of the new US abstract expressionist avant-garde arose from: “a superior consciousness of history – more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism …which made it possible.”

This "consciousness of history" (according to this particular essay) somehow or other affected artists, who were even unaware of it, as it apparently just floated in on the breeze of the Zeitgeist.

In terms of Benjamin’s productive aesthetic, we can see how naïve Greenberg’s "spiritual" view actually is, how it is really a repetition of the position that Benjamin was against. Yet, peculiarly, it is used to defend just the kind of technique and quality Benjamin was arguing for (at least in “The Author as Producer”).

Greenberg’s stance clearly stems from a Marxist, but still rather humanist and consequently Hegelian, understanding of art and ideology, in which art is reduced to ideology and ideology is really “Spirit” dressed as class struggle. Thus, for Greenberg, the state's education of the artist makes no appearance and everything is a question of mental and narrated allegiance, hovering at a distance above economic facts, but occasionally dipping into them to justify certain opinions. Greenberg essentially writes about art from a position assumed to be beyond scientific accountability, that is, from the traditional perspective of the arts/science bifurcation. He is in art, so he accordingly feels little obligation to provide evidence to the same degree as would be necessary in scientific discourse. Here it is only required to be convincing in the "humanities-art way": to be erudite, to be well-referenced, and to be a bit radical. Consequently his Marxism functions not to demand any scientific advance in art theory, but as an externally applied politics, i.e., more a posture than a position.

In order to save the avant-garde and high art, with its special aura, even from the Soviets and their fellow travelers, whom he saw as aesthetically entwined in old-fashioned realism. Greenberg is thus obliged to distinguish between avant-garde art and "lowbrow" kitsch. But he had to do this without breaking the bourgeois taboo against “accounting for taste.” Therefore his theory is ultimately only able to infer the existence of undefined "special people" who have the capacity to "divine" the difference between "high" and "low." This notion of "special people" is also applied to the artists he championed. Thus, although Greenberg champions avant-garde abstract artists, his is not the more rational avant-garde aesthetic of, for example, the Soviet Constructivists (e.g. Malevich, Popova, Rodchenko and Rozanova), or that of Mondrian, but a mystical one that suited his denegation of exact knowledge better. This was undoubtedly an aesthetic which still owed a great debt to the European and Soviet avant-garde in formal terms, but also, I argue, had hypnoidal aspects that could more readily support a mystical narrative.

The works of the Abstract Expressionists are technically impressive and formally radical and were, I think (though I will not argue that here), superior to the then official Soviet art (whose existence, I believe, contributed to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union), and had ditched certain "dangerous" Brechtian elements of the kind for which Benjamin argued.

To conclude, I maintain that in the new (US) context the techniques of avant-garde art were relatively defused to make them more amenable to their new social context, yet they still functioned in a progressive way (internally to the US, while externally they became a reactionary symbol representing the radicalism of the "free world").

Greenberg, Benjamin and Althusser were writing against the same historical backdrop, the October Revolution and the rise of the artistic avant-garde, particularly the Soviet avant-garde, and its influence, and the lasting effects of World War II, including the legacies of Nazism, Stalinism and cult of personality. It seems to me that Benjamin and Althusser were struggling to free themselves from the vestiges of humanism in how Marxism was interpreted, and that they realized the question of art was somehow central to this project. They did not entirely succeed. Indeed, they both retreat, after making some bold advances at certain stages in their writings (Althusser, for instance, towards the end of his essay on the Piccolo Teatro), to a slightly more conservative position on the question of art. I suggest this was because they came up against the dominant world view that Greenberg aptly voiced and for which he was lionized. Greenberg’s theoretical bequest, however, is much weaker than either Benjamin or Althusser, because he does not really offer any new concepts of art for us to work with.


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