Dialectics: As Opposed to What?

Looking back at Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious (I'm working with the selection in Norton's Theory and Criticism) the issue of the utility of Marxist dialectic comes up.

Jameson argues that "the perspectives of Marxism as necessay preconditions for adequate literary comprehension" (Norton 1941). Since he does not qualify this, I must him to mean that the statement is true regardless of what the understanding may be adequate to, regardless of the historical context. He does not seem to have slipped, either: at the very beginning of his preface, one finds, "Always historicize! This slogan -- the one absolute and we may even say 'transhistorical' imperative of all dialectical thought -- will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well. So Jameseon would have us treat this as a bona fide universal.

Despite the rich history of Marxist analysis, this approach bears difficulties in its initial conception, in part because opposition in the sense that Hegel used the term does not happen between objects.

For one thing, the assembly of an opposition requires at least a third value, that of a normal "between" them. The dichotomy of opposition, therefore, not only can never be absolute, but can never properly be dichotomy. If we say that ice opposes fire because the one is cold, the other hot, and we decide that in some sense the ice is it's cold and the fire is its heat, we still must assume a third value, in this case a range of temperature we find normal. Were we to posit normal at zero degrees kelvin, both fire and the ice in my drink are hot.

Another difficulty, perhaps deeper, comes from the issue of materiality. Surely some sharp student was bound to stand old George Wilhelm Friedrich on his head, but we shouldn't have been surprised if a few things rolled out of the man's pockets. Marx and Fuerbach would have their dialectics material, but that might not be so simple as willing it so. Opposition itself requires a third value to define because it is ideal, not material.

This may not be self-explanatory. Opposition is opposition ofqualities, and qualities are not objects, not material. They may be qualities we apply to objects or understand of objects, but they are not objects themselves. Therefore heat may oppose cold, given a normal temperature in between, but a proletariat cannot oppose a bourgeoisie in the same way, even though they battle mightily over conflicting interests.

There's more than semantics here. A given proletariat or bourgeoisie of which I speak is a group of variant individuals whom I have grouped for characteristics I hold them to share, and for that matter, not all characteristics, but only those that appear to me relevant to a given issue. Of course, the characteristic is something I apply to them based on a standard I have abstracted from experience. The results of their interaction may involve active response between any distinctions that may happen, not just oppositions.

Again, the historicity introduced by dialect has tremendous value, as does Marx's insistence on founding action on human need. But the business of binary opposition as the basic movement of history runs an unfortunate streak of distortion through much otherwise useful analysis.

Walter Benjamin

Benjamin the effect on art of the advent of photography:

" With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, the right reacted with the doctrine of l'art pourl'art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of 'pure' art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position)" (1237).

Benjamin makes an interesting judgment in calling photos the first "means of reproduction" although printing had reproduced words and their written arrangement for centuries prior. Although he doesn't say so, surely the automation of print in the 1800's and even increased transport and distribution would have contributed to these same effects for similar reasons. Just as painting no longer had to photograph, the novel had less to do with journalism.

". . . for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the wo of art reproduced becomes example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics . . . .

With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunites for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statute of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. (1237).

Here he begs some questions, but the idea is interesting. Just how does reproduction release art from ritual? Does it remove the necessity of a priesthood to interpret or perform it? Would the term ritual be as meaningful if the statue of divinity were in a secular museum instead of a temple? I wonder whether Benjamin might not mean in part that art can be freed of certain socioeconomic trappings, that reproduction removes the objet d'art from social contextualization or from a contextualization.

If so, this seems opposed to the findings of Horkheimer and Adorno, who insist not many years later (Benjamin 1935, Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947) that capitalism and broadcast technology have rendered artistic production uniform.

Either way, publication in 1935 was rigidly linked to patterns of profit and distribution, broadcast even more so, at least in the US, where public airwaves had been given away to now-familiar broadcast corporations.

Perhaps more important to ritual than the physical mobility of the objet d'art is its social mobility, its usability by different classes. In that event, use must refer to consumption, production, and determining decisions over production and distribution.

There may be a general principle here. Contemporary readers may refer to current debates over intellectual property, .torrent files and filesharing networks. Some will remember how similar the dialog was in the early 1980's when the music industry momentarily crashed or played possum in response to the arrival of recordable cassette tapes. But I suspect that technology has impacted power over information for a long time. Papyrus would have also made writing easier to hide as well as transport. It would have made it possible to view writing without the authority of a temple. The early development of Western monotheism has survived more extensively and securely in the Hebrew texts than in the Egyptian record, not because the Egyptians had no paper or less paper, of course, but because the Hebrews may have known early on that their records had to be moved and stored. The religious texts include documents that are in some ways revolutionary; that may in part be because of the draw of the form.

Well, enough speculation in that quarter. Walter Ong has some interesting things to day on the subject, though, if anyone's interested. Benjamin, meanwhile, goes on with some appreciation of film:

"For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact hat behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed with much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incompareably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science" (1238).

I find the tone here interesting because Benjamin himself has clearly lived through the change. There's something in it that reminds me of trying to convey to students what it felt like typing papers on an old underwood typwriter and swearing and running to the store for white-out. Awareness of the distinction is lost to the population very quickly.

Ten years ago I read in books that The Book was to come to and end. Now I read in blogs that the book will survive. We ain't in Kansas anymore -- though, for all I know, you might be.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." in Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.