The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film

Theory
Author(s): Richard W. Allen
Source: New German Critique, No. 40, Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory (Winter, 1987),
pp. 225-240
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488139
Accessed: 27-09-2016 13:59 UTC
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The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity:

Benjamin, Adorno, and

Contemporary Film Theory

by Richard W. Allen
There can be no aesthetic of the cinema, not even

a purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema.'

Theodor W. Adomo

The Fantasy of Film Theory

In contemporary film theory one may delineate two types of argument to account for the nature of the fascination of film both of which

lead to the conclusion that the experience of cinema is an experience of

fantasy. I will term these the argument from ontology and the argument
from enunciation. The argument from ontology has two distinct parts
Its premise, most eloquently articulated by Andre Bazin in "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," is that in film there is a causal relation

ship between the image and what the image depicts.2 In contrast t

painterly representation which involves an imaginative transformation

of 'reality' on the part of the artist, film is essentially a non-intentiona
medium, involving the unmediated presentation of objects through the

technology of photographic reproduction, and hence conforms, mor

or less, to standard perception. This argument is not vitiated by the con

*Many thanks to Miriam Hansen for her encouragement and guidance in the writing o
this paper. Thanks also to Thomas Elsaesser and Paul Willemen for their comments on

an earlier draft.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, "Transparencies on Film," trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New

German Critique 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981), 202.

2. See Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" in What is Cinema?
vol. 1, selected and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor
nia Press, 1967), pp. 9-16.
225

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226 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

tention that the shots of a film are isolated and edited from a specific
point of view and that, for example, two versions of the same story or de-

pictions of the same place may be entirely different.3 The point is that a
film image, other things being equal (i.e., in the absence of specific sub-

jective markers), does not appear to have a 'voice.'

The second part of the argument could be construed as a Metzian
transformation of this Bazinian contention. The distinction drawn be-

tween the intentionality and non-intentionality of the object is isomorphic to a contrast in the subjective apprehension of the object between

fantasy and aesthetic contemplation. The aesthetic experience of the

viewer of a painting corresponds to the intentionality expressed in the
image looked at, and involves, as it were, an imaginary desire pursuing
an imaginary object. By contrast, the cinema, in Christian Metz's terminology, is characterized as an 'imaginary signifier' at once present (the
image, lacking subjective markers, appears to be real), yet absent (it is reproduced by a mechanical apparatus).4 The reality-effect thus produced
activates or services the fantasy of the viewer, which is understood as a
real desire pursuing a real but surrogate object.5
The argument from enunciation is more difficult to paraphrase because of its technical reliance on the concept of the suturing of the subject in discourse articulated by Lacanian psychoanalysis. In its application to the discourse of film the concept described a specific form of
narrational system, the shot/counter-shot or reverse-field cutting, which
binds the subject into the narrative through character point-of-view.6
Initially in this scenario, the spectator, in accordance with the ontological argument, identifies with the camera. But the spell cast by this apparent perception of the real is broken by the realization that one does
not actually own the look. This creates an absence, or to use the term
3. Dudley Andrew erroneously suggests that these contentions refute the
ontological argument in Concepts in Film Theory (New York: Oxford University Press,
1984), p. 52. He is arguing against Roger Scruton who puts forward a Bazinian argument in "Photography and Representation," Critical Inquiry 7 (1981), 577-603; reprinted
in The Aesthetic Understanding (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 102-26.
4. See Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," trans. Ben Brewster in Screen 16:2
(Summer 1975), reprinted in The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1982), esp. pp. 42-57.
5. See Scruton's discussion of fantasy and the cinema along Metzian lines in "Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen," in The Aesthetic Understanding, pp. 127-37.
6. SeeJean-Pierre Oudart, "Cinema and Suture," trans. in Screen 18:4 (Winter 197778), pp. 35-47, and Daniel Dayan, "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema," Film Quarterly
(Fall 1974), pp. 22-31, reprinted in Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, pp. 438-51.

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Richard Allen 227

with more resonance, a'lack', which is temporarily assuaged by identification with the character's look in the reverse-field, and so on. In the
light of empirical criticisms that the system of reverse-field cutting is not

as ubiquitous in the cinema as the account suggests, even in classical

Hollywood cinema, Stephen Heath has modified the argument, returning closer to Lacan's original conception. All films, as discourse, suture
the subject, but some systematically reveal the process of stitching even
as it holds the subject together in discourse, whilst others, classical Hollywood cinema in particular, systematically mask it, even as the'subjecteffect' is an unstable one. In this context, reverse-field cutting becomes
the representative figure of a particular suturing system. Heath offers
the following gloss on the relationship between the particular system
and the general concept: "No discourse without suture... but, equally,
no suture which is not from the beginning specifically defined within a
particular system which gives it form."'

The argument from enunciation depends on the relationship between fantasy and the reality-effect of the image established by the
ontological argument. However, the ontological argument does not entail the argument from enunciation. Interpreted in psychoanalytic
terms, the ontological argument suggests a regression to a point prior to
the formation of the ego, but it does not depend upon a psychoanalytic
conception of subjectivity for its coherence. Insofar as the point of the
ontological argument is to foreground the contrast between cinema and
the traditional arts, between fantasy and imagination or contemplation,
it can be made equally forcefully outside the terms of psychoanalytic
theory as within them.8 By contrast, the enunciative argument recognizes the fact, so to speak, that you can only have fantasy when you have
an ego and the 'lack' that goes with it. It depends upon a psychoanalytic
concept of the 'subject in discourse' that is incommensurable with 'normal' conceptions of subjectivity and aesthetic experience. As Geoffrey
7. Stephen Heath, "Notes on Suture," Screen 18:4 (Winter 1977-1978), reprinted as
"On Suture" in Questions of Cinema (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), p. 101.
The criticisms of suture theory are to be found in Barry Salt, "Film Style and Technology
in the Forties," Film Quarterly (Fall 1977), 46-57, and William Rothman, "Against the System of the Suture," Film Quarterly (Fall 1975), 45-50, reprinted in Nichols, ed., Movies and
Methods, pp. 451-59.

8. For a non-psychoanalytic account, see Scruton, "Fantasy, Imagination and the

Screen." For a Freudian account of the distinction, though not explicitly applied to the
cinema, see Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 105-17.

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228 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

Nowell-Smith has pointed out, this psychoanalytic approach does not

rest content with the ontological argument for:
it is crucially concerned with the intersubjectivity of the construction of meaning. In the absence of a subject of enunciation on the side of film it is hard to see what position is possible for that other subject, that of the spectator him/herself.
The spectating subject requires the relation to another in order to situate itself, and somewhere the film must provide it

with that other.9

While in film such a relationship is established with fictional characters,

the ontological argument suggests that this fictive relationship is secondary to the reality-effect due to the absence of discursive or subjective
markers. Thus, for the enunciative argument, the play of discourse and
reality-effect (6nonciation and 6nonce), the narrativization of space, and the

positioning and re-positioning of the spectating subject is specified by

the mutual articulation of positional identification or looks, four in all,
in narrative film.'0 In this context, even if it is not that common, reverse-

field cutting, as described by the system of the suture, is not simply one

such articulation, but also serves to dramatize the general process by

which a phantasmatic subject position is maintained by narrative film.
The central problem with the concept of the cinema as fantasy and the
phantasmatic subject of enunciation articulated by contemporary film
theory is that while denying an aesthetic relation to the cinema, as traditionally conceived, it remains defined in terms of the traditional subject
and object of aesthetics. Aesthetic experience is stripped to a semblance
of its former character. Most crucially, the significance of the penetration of technology into aesthetics is trivialized, by effectively denying the

aesthetic content of the technological artifact along with its loss of

intentionality. Yet, as with the artwork of traditional aesthetics, the wider

framework of historical experience seems irrelevant to understanding

the significance of film texts, and even the institution of the cinema in
general, for the apprehending subject. Similarly the traditional subject

9. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "A Note on History/Discourse," Edinburgh Magazine 1

(1976) 28.
10. These looks are intra-diegetic looks, the camera's look at the profilmic space and

the viewer's look at the image. The fourth look, of a different order to the other three, is
the possibility to look out at the spectator from the fiction. See Paul Willeman, "Letter to

John," Screen 21:2 (Summer 1980), 53-66.

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Richard Allen 229

of aesthetic experience is denied, yet retained in an impoverished form.

Stripped of his or her intentional faculties, the reified subject of enuncia-

tion in contemporary theory is an empty vessel shot through with

libidinal currents, endlessly replicated in the viewing experience, historically unchanging and ineffectual.
It is my programmatic contention here that German film theory, in
particular the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, provides an alternative, historically aware, conception of aesthetic experi-

ence. Two concepts seem crucial in the writings of Benjamin and

Adorno: mimetic experience and distraction. An exploration of these
terms will suggest the extent to which the aesthetic experience of the cin-

ema, and indeed other mass media, can be conceptualized only in the
light of the historical transformation of experience in modernity. The
traditional subject of aesthetic experience is no longer appropriate, because subjectivity has undergone an internal transformation along with
the nature of aesthetic experience. In fact, the theory of cinematic fascination which emerges from these writers is historical in two senses. Not
merely is this fascination necessarily predicated on the experience of
modernity, but it implies a subjectivity that itself undergoes historical
transformation. Modernity is thus characterized as being thoroughly
historical and cinematic fascination becomes an exemplary feature of
this experience. My argument turns on the development of a conception of cinema as a form of intersubjective experience, called distraction
by Benjamin, which mediates between the spheres of public and private
experience. Breaking with past forms of aesthetic experience, the cine-

ma suggests a medium which is both productive of and produced by

historically changing constellations in the relationship between public
and private. In order to develop a clear understanding of the historical
nature of the concept of distraction it will be necessary to trace the historical and theoretical dimensions of mimetic experience in Benjamin

and Adorno.

Mimetic Experience in Modernity

The concept of mimesis is one which unites a philosophy of history,

an aesthetic theory and a theory of language. At the most general level,
Benjamin argues in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" that mechanical reproduction has transformed the relationship established since the Enlightenment between art, science and

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230 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

progress, and hence has transformed the nature of mimetic experience.

Benjamin conceptualizes this historical transformation in opposition to
the traditional picture, which is summarized in the Passagen-Werk by a
quotation from Turgot's Second discours sur les progres successifs de l'esprit
humain:
The arts, whose purpose is to please us, are as limited as we
are. Time constantly brings about new discoveries in the sciences; but poetry, painting, music have a fixed point which is
determined by the genius of language, the imitation of nature, and the limited sensibility of our organs."

Here, progress resides in the scientific domain, in the relationship be-

tween reason and technology through which man dominates nature.

This domain is radically split off from the aesthetic realm in which man
expresses his affinity to nature. It is essentially the expression of this re-

lationship which forms, for Benjamin, the experience of "aura"; "the

transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man."'2
Benjamin speculates on the origins of the division between reason
and nature in his early metaphysical account of the origins of language.
He suggests that in the prelapsarian universe cognition and being were
one. Linguistic sign and image universally combined in a mimetic correspondence between word and thing, between human expressivity and
the natural world.13 After the fall the sign became split from its original
resemblance to the object and the mimetic function became the esoteric
provenance of art. Much later Benjamin refined this conception sug-

gesting that knowledge, obtained through conceptualization,

though never complete, is genuine insofar as it traces the "nonsensuous
similarities" which recall the archaic unity of word and thing.'4 Con11. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk "Konvolut N", trans. by Leigh

Hafrey and Richard Sieburth as "Theoretics of Knowledge, Theory of Progress," in The

Philosophical Forum 15:1-2 (Fall/Winter 1983/84), p. 26.

12. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," (1939), in Illuminations,

trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. 190.

13. See Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"

(1916), in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken,

1986), pp. 314-32. For Benjamin, language or denotative relation between word and

thing: "The word after the fall must communicate something (other than itself). That is
really the fall of language-mind." (p. 327).
14. Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty" (1933), in Reflections, p. 335. An earlier version of the essay, "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933), is trans. by Knut Tarnowski in New
German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 65-69.

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Richard Allen 231

versely art, while it can express this unity, can only intimate knowle
since it is abstracted from the concrete language of cognition.
In Dialectic ofEnlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer echo Benjamin
account in the "Artwork" essay of the affinity between auratic art
the fetish of primitive ritual:
It is the nature of the work of art, or aesthetic semblance, to

be what the new, terrifying occurrence became in the primitive's magic; the appearance of the whole in the particular. In
the work of art that duplication still occurs by which the thing
appeared as spiritual, as the expression of mana. This constitutes its aura."'15

Furthermore, they strip the metaphysical dimension from Benjamin

philosophy of language by describing the split in the mimetic faculty

an historical consequence of the Enlightenment division between

strumental reason and art:

With the clean separation of science and poetry, the division

of labor it has already helped to effect was extended to language... As a system of signs, language is required to resign itself to calculation in order to know nature, and must discard
the claim to be like her. As image it is required to resign itself
to mirror imagery in order to be nature entire, and must discard the claim to know her.16

In fact, this division immediately threatens the status of art. Reduced to

mere imitation, it can only imitate the increasingly reified world ('second nature') of which it is a part. Thus for Adorno, if art is mimetic, authentic art, paradoxically, is that which imitates itself, intentionally expressing in its formal autonomy unreconciled reality."
Benjamin's Passagen-Werk and, more directly still, the "Artwork" essay, express the vision that this divison is coming to an end. From the
point of view of Benjamin's redemptive criticism, the traditional conception of historical progress is dramatized and parodied by technological antiquation in advanced capitalism. At first sight innovation appears
15. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightment (1944), trans.
John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1969), p. 19.
16. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 17-18.
17. This is, essentially, Adorno's theory of modernism, canonically enshrined in the
posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London, Boston, Melbourne, Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

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232 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

as repetition, history as myth: "Only a thoughtless observer would deny

that there are correspondences between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbolic world of mythology. Initially the new technology appears as no more than that."'8s Yet the accelerated antiquation
evidenced for Benjamin in the debris of nineteenth-century consumer
capitalism, in particular the ruins of the Paris Arcades, demonstrates a
different conception of history which is articulated in the "Theses on the

Philosophy of History." Here the historical is that which can only be

understood from the point of view of messianic reconciliation in which
"the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption."'19 It is an index which is expressed in the aura of the tradi-

tional artwork:

In every true work of art, there is a point at which anyone who

puts himself into it will feel it blowing toward him like the
cool wind of the coming dawn. It becomes apparent that art,
which has often been considered resistant in any connection
to progress, can give the latter its true determination. Progress
lodges, not in the continuity of the course of time, but rather
in its moments of interference: where the truly new first
makes itself felt with the sobriety of the dawn.20

However, as we have seen, traditional art also embodies the impossibility of reconciliation; in its very abstraction from progress as traditionally conceived, it remains esoteric and mystical. If modernity offers a
new vision of reconciliation it is that the mimetic capacity finds expression in the very realm where it seemed to be denied. For Benjamin, the

debris of the Paris Arcades mimes the reified world in a manner akin to

the surrealists' representation of found objects. These sediments of

mass culture are relics of a collective social history which resonate with a
utopian force. Innovation appears as repetition in the images of itself
modernity secretes, but they also reveal to the cultural historian the eternal promise of the new in the guise of the always already old. Because
these relics are man-made, yet inert and lacking in intentionality, social,
yet appearing as natural, historical yet mythical, they point to the possibility of a utopian reconciliation of cognition and being.21

18. Benjamin, Passagen-Werk "Konvolut N", p. 6.

19. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940), in Illuminations, p. 256.

20. Benjamin, Passagen-Werk "Konvolut N," p. 22.

21. My understanding of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk is indebted to the work of Susan

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Richard Allen 233

If the Passagen- Werk and the Baudelaire essays suggest a secularizat

of the mimetic function by a kind of aestheticization of everyday life
the obsolescence of consumer artifacts, the "Artwork" essay focuses
the penetration of art by reproductive technology and the developm
of new technologically based arts, of which film is a pre-eminent exam
ple. The question at stake in Benjamin's essay is whether the penetrat
of technology into art offers the promise of the secular reconciliation
the two halves of existence in the name of a new collective mode of ex
rience, simultaneously cognitive and mimetic, and how this experien

is to be conceptualized.

In presenting an "equipment free aspect of reality," film offers a re

resentation of 'second nature' opening up the contemporary world

an allegorical landscape in a manner akin to the representations prov
ed by the relics of consumer culture: "Then came film and burst thi
prison world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so t
now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly a
adventurously go travelling."22 Here, the camera is equated with
nineteenth century flineur and Benjamin's own role as the cultural h
torian of modernity in the Passagen-Werk. However, as Miriam Hans

has suggested, "film is more than an epistemological tool for the mate
alist intellectual." While representation on film mimes the reified wor
it does not do so in the sense of merely reproducing it, since "it is its
part of the historical process or crisis of which the urban masses are t

obvious symptom."23 Rather, an as "optical unconscious" the cam

redeems aspects of shared experience and invests it with n

intersubjective significance.24 In this sense film preserves the aura of t

traditional artwork with its ability to return the gaze, but it is an a

Buck-Morss. See "Walter Benjamin - Revolutionary Writer (I)," New Left Review 1

(July/August 1981), pp. 50-75, "Walter Benjamin - Revolutionary Writer (II)," New Le

Review 12:9 (Sept/Oct 1981), pp. 75-95, and "Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Redeem

Mass Culture for the Revolution," New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer 1983),

211-40.

22. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), in
Illuminations, p. 238.

23. The above quotations are from Miriam Hansen's paper, "The Blue Flower in

the Land of Technology: Benjamin on Representation and Reception," delivered at th

Society for Cinema Studies Conference, New York, 1985. The following reading is
indebted to this paper as it is toJiUrgen Habermas' "Consciousness Raising or Redemp
tive Criticism - The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin," trans. by Philip Brewster
and Carl Howard Bachner in New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 30-59.

24. Benjamin, "Artwork," p. 239.

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234 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

stripped of its basis in individual, esoteric, aesthetic contemplation

which has "burst the auratic shell and become exoteric."25 Benjamin
uses Kracauer's concept of distraction in its critical sense to describe this
exoteric aesthetic experience which he sees as characteristic of modernity.26

For Benjamin, the historical transformation of aesthetic experience in

the twentieth century is intimately tied to a transformation in subjectivi-

ty and sense perception brought about by urban, mechanized, industri-

al existence: "Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing

noticeably in all fields or art... is symptomatic of profound changes in
apperception, [and] finds in film its true means of exercise."27 Both in
the represention of movement and in the movement of the perceptual
field through the edited image, film represents the 'real' as the synthetic
traces of the fragmented and fragmentary perceptions of modern urban
man, an exteriorized realization of an interiorized transformation of
perception. As distraction, film conforms to the habits of lived experience where individuals have learned to parry the shock factor of day to
day existence, unreflectingly making sense out of a whole array of visual
data. But this lack of intentionality in everyday perception that is repro-

ducedin the cinema, by being reproduced in mediated, externalized

and objectified, thereby liberating its contents to be re-invested with
new meanings. The rational, cognitive aspect of the experience of film is
suggested by Benjamin's metaphor of the surgical instrument; cutting

through reality like a surgeon's knife, the camera liberates hitherto

unrevealed fragments of reality that can be recontextualized in the editing process in a multiplicity of semiotic operations, of which the primary one, for Benjamin, is montage.28
If, for Benjamin, film affords the possiblity of the coming together of
the cognitive and mimetic aspects of experience, it is through the fact

that individual aesthetic experience is subordinated, due to the

intentionless aspect of technological reproduction, to a process of collective signification. With the auratic shell broken, mimetic experience
can once again take on a public intersubjective signifying form. It is a
reconciliation at the level of aesthetic experience forged by the penetra25. Habermas, "Consciousness Raising or Redemptive Criticism," p. 47.
26. For Kracauer's understanding of distraction see "The Cult of Distraction,"

(1926), trans. in this issue.

27. Benjamin, "Artwork," pp. 242.

28. See Benjamin's "Artwork," pp. 235-36.

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Richard Allen 235

tion of technology into art. However, undoubtedly in the "Artwork" essay, Benjamin wishes to go much further. In the light of Benjamin's peculiar brand of eschatological Marxism, modernity not only offers a new
and universal form of aesthetic experience, it offers a possiblity of reconciliation which goes beyond the aesthetic realm.
The concept of distraction as shock has an aspect which expresses the
very entrance into modernity and not merely the experience of a subjectivity which has already learned to live with the exigencies of modem
life. Film might be said to mime this experience in that it too can provoke, quite commonly, a visceral sense of shock, a phenomenon which
is intimately tied to its technological foundations. But Benjamin would
like to link this visceral sense of shock to a cognitive dimension whereby
distraction jolts the spectator out of an unreflective mode of apprehen-

sion. The influence of Brecht is apparent here, as well as Eisenstein's

provocative synthesis of behaviorist psychology and Marxism in the
context of film theory.29 This aspect of Benjamin's conception of distraction is tied to a "flatly realist theory of representation," for the trans-

formation of consciousness that it provokes is linked to its ability to represent the masses.30 Finally, the intersubjective aspect of the medium
here is a direct expression of the fact that film is a mass medium which is

simultaneously consumed due to its technological reproducibility.

Thus the shock effect, together with the mimetic aspects of the medium,
realistically construed, allows the possibility of the masses gaining cognitive access to a reconciled reality in which they themselves appear as
subjects of representation. From this perspective the historical transformations wrought by urban life and mechanical reproduction, expressed
in the cinema, are nothing less than a prelude to the revolutionary rec-

onciliation promised by Hegelian Marxism; a reconciliation which

waits only for the revolution in the base (transformation in the relations

of production) to catch up with the revolution in the superstructure

(transformation in the mode of perception).
On this interpretation, Benjamin falls at once into a naive realism and
an equally naive historicism. To the extent that this realist emphasis pre-

dominates and the intersubjective nature of the medium is seen as a

function of its transparent referential status and mode of simultaneous
29. See, for example, Sergei Eisenstein, "Methods ofMontage," in Film Form ed. and
trans.Jay Leyda (New York and London: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1949), pp. 72-83.

30. Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience."

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236 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

consumption, the status of the cinema under capitalism immediately

calls Benjamin's analysis into question. It invites the kind of ideological
critique that Adorno carries out in Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) and most directly contra Benjamin in "On the Fetish Character
in Music and the Regression of Listening."31

In his analysis of the "culture industry," Adorno, like Benjamin,

reads the film image allegorically, and like Benjamin, he is a privileged
reader. However, the undeniably mimetic aspect of the image, from the
point of view of a realist ontology, is, in Adorno's view, instrumentalized
by the film industry, taking on the 'false aura' of the commodity. It is not

simply that film under capitalism is a commodity, it is that film reproduces the structure of the commodity in the aesthetic realm. The relationship between image and referent in the mechanically reproduced
image mirrors the relationship established between use value and exchange value in the commodity. Just as use value appears to ensure that
exchange value can function as an index of need, so the referent appears
to anchor the image in reality.32 Doubly infused with the rationality of
the exchange function, the aesthetic experience of film does indeed offer a reconciliation of instrumental reason and mimetic experience. It
marks the historical synthesis of traditional experience and the mechanisms of advertising with their calculated appeal to the apparent needs
of an ideal universalized consumer. This, for Adorno, is a false reconci-

liation, to the one-sided impoverishment of aesthetic experience. Mass

culture eliminates the possibility of aesthetic experience rather than
transforms it, in a process which is symptomatic of the general erosion
of experience in modernity.
In Minima Moralia, in an explicit counter-argument to Benjamin's notion of 'shock,' Adorno reads the modern transformation in perception
as the erosion of individuality, qualitative difference and genuine experience in a reified world.33 In this context the concept of distraction
characterizes the way in which the mass media under capitalism repro31. Trans. in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader eds. Andrew Arato and Eike
Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), pp. 270-99.
32. For Adorno's account of the relationship between signification and the commodity form, see Negative Dialectics trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973),
pp. 146-48. See also my article, "Critical Theory and the Paradox of Modernist Discourse," Screen 28:3 (1987), for a comparison between Adorno and Baudrillard on this

issue.

33. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso,
1974), pp. 235-38.

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Richard Allen 237

duce the individual as the subject of mass consumption. Adorno d

scribes this process as "psychoanalysis in reverse" whereby the fi

spectator is manipulated to the point of masochistically desiring his

her own manipulation and the cinema actually activates repressed im
pulses to copy and compulsively repeat.34 The task of the critic becom

one of decoding the deceptive appearance of the image as 'second

ture.' "Dialectic," writes Adorno, "interprets every image as writing.

shows how the admission of its falsity is to be read in the lines of its f
tures - a confession that deprives it of its power and appropriates it f
truth."35

Adorno's detailed analysis of the narrative effects and procedures o

commercial cinema and their historical origin provide a precise

totalizing, historical characterization of the mechanism of encha

ment, loss and re-enchantment analyzed by contemporary theory. Fu

thermore, implied in this historical argument itself is the possibility

an authentic aesthetic experience. Benjamin's argument as to th

inseparability of film technique from its basis in technological repro

duction, its essentially mimetic ontology, suggests for Adorno too th
collective nature of the medium. But it is irreducibly and a priori aesth
ic. It cannot, in a utopian gesture, reconcile the necessary truth of a
and the contingency of reality, although it may readily be used to g
the appearance of reconciliation:
That, among its functions, film provides models for collective

behavior is not just an additional imposition of ideology.

Such collectivity, rather, inheres in the innermost elements of
film. The movements which the film presents are mimetic
impulses which prior to all content and meaning incite the
viewers and listeners into step as if in a parade... It would not
be incorrect to describe the constitutive subject of film as a
"we" in which the aesthetic and the sociological apsects of the
medium converge. Anything Goes was the title of a film by
Gracie Fields; this 'anything' captures the very substance of
film's formal movement prior to all content... The indeterminate nature of this collective 'anything', however, which is
linked to the formal character of film facilitates the ideological
misuse of the medium... The liberated film would have to
34. Adorno uses this phrase, borrowed from Leo Lowenthal, in "Television and the
Patterns of Mass Culture," reprinted from Quarterly ofFilm, Radio and Television 3 (Spring

1954) in Mass Culture eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David White (Glencoe, Il: Free Press,
1957), p. 480.
35. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 24.

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238 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

wrest its a priori collectivity from the mechanisms of unconscious and irrational influence and enlist this collectivity in
the service of emancipatory intentions.36

In a sense the difference between Benjamin and Adorno lies in how to

interpret the relationship betwen the ontological status of the medium
and the sociology of mass consumption. At first sight this difference
takes the form of an invidious opposition between two equally extreme

views: Benjamins's bold espousal of distraction as an emancipatory

form of collective experience and Adorno's bleak vision of collective catatonia provoked by corporate capitalism. Adorno's conception of the a
priori intersubjectivity of the aesthetic experience of film, even if it is a
guardedly positive evaluation of the medium, is still conceived within
traditional aesthetic categories. These remain historically unchanging as
terms within which to characterize aesthetic experience, in spite of the
fact that Adorno is rigorously historical in the sense that he maintains
that aesthetic value is governed by historical context.37 Film tentatively
regains an aesthetic status only insofar as it is autonomous art, and it is
only as autonomous art that it partakes of a true collectivity:
works of art, and that includes the so-called individualistic
ones, speak the language of a 'We,' not of an 'I,' and they do
so to the extent to which they refrain from conforming in
some extrinsic fashion to that 'We' and its idiom.38

Nevertheless, Adorno's formulation does suggest something else,

much closer to Benjamin's conception of distraction, indeed almost a
clarification of it. The sociology of mass consumption is stripped entirely of the realist dimension of representation and mass experience
and is interpreted in a resolutely figurative fashion which expresses the
transformed nature of aesthetic experience. This is not to say that a positive evaluation of the medium from a Benjaminian perspective should
be uncritically endorsed, and that the ideological criticisms of Adorno
are simply invalidated because he remains wedded to a traditional account of aesthetic autonomy. Rather, the concept of distraction allows
us to begin to conceptualize, more adequately, the historically changing
relationship between aesthetics and ideology.
36. Adorno, "Transparencies on Film," 203.
37. For example, Adorno's defense of modernism in Aesthetic Theory is fundamentally based on the contention that certain modernist art expresses, in its formal structure,
the alienation of experience in late capitalism.
38. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 240.

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Richard Allen 239

Distraction and Film History

Benjamin's conception of the destruction of aura as the historical

transformation in the conditions of aesthetic understanding from indi-

vidual to collective modes of reception is crucial for the arguments

sketched at the outset of this paper. These arguments only proceed on
the assumption of the essentially private nature of aesthetic experience.
In the light of Benjamin's argument, the cinematic signifier cannot be
divorced from its conditions of reception. If it is an imaginary signifier,
the cinema signifies an intersubjective imaginary, even though it may
be, as it were, consumed in private. The concept of distraction captures
this dual aspect, at once a medium of signification and a shared mode of
reception. The forms of subjectivity appealed to by a given cinema in a
given institutional context become a particular way of giving shape to
and realizing intersubjective experience. It is at the moment of moulding the form of the spectator's apprehension that the public sphere of
experience, the dimension of history, intervenes in aesthetic experience.

If, in what has come to be known as classical Hollyw

particular form of subjectivity appealed to is a phantas
a result of a specific historical instrumentalization of t
ticular, the institutionalization of certain narrative te
vices, and not,pace Metz, as a result of its essence. This,

the import of Noel Burch's polemical characterizati

cinematic signifier, existing historically prior to and

tinct from what he terms the "institutional mode of
Burch's 'primitive cinema' suggests a different public
subjectivity at odds with that appealed to by the 'li
signifier' in classical Hollywood cinema.39 Furthermor
extent to which classical Hollywood cinema itself is less

reproducing the phantasmatic subject and more ad

tualized as an arena in which competing and potentiall

39. For examples of Burch's work see "Porter or Ambivalence,

1978-79), pp. 91-108, and "A Parenthesis on Film History," in To

Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles

nia Press, 1979), pp. 61-66. See also Miriam Hansen's important c

critics in the context of a discussion of Oskar Negt's and Alexander

'proletarian' public sphere and early American silent cinema in

Whose Public Sphere?" New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer

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240 Aesthetic Experience ofModernity

forms of subjectivity are appealed to. In particular, it suggests that the

public sphere which classical Hollywood emerges from is only partially
and incompletely repressed. It resurfaces forcefully at different historical moments where non-linear signification disrupts the harmony of
classical narrative; in early silent films, silent comedy, the Marx Brothers, animated cartoons and the thirties musical, but also, arguably, in
the hyper-realism of genres such as the Western andfilm noir; in such a

way as to break open overly monolithic conceptions of commercial

American cinema.

In conclusion, once the conception of cinema as fantasy is wrested

from ontology and relocated in the relationship between signification
and reception, a space is opened up in which to understand and analyze

the aesthetics of the cinema which is reducible neither to traditional

contemplative aesthetics nor to a psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity

divorced from historical context. The task of an historically informed
film theory is to formulate the way in which individual subjectivity is articulated with 'trans-individual' subjectivity over time and within and
across different institutional and national contexts. This is inseparable
from the development of a theoretically informed film history with a
method which is adequate to account for the shifting relationship between the public and private spheres as they intersect in the historically
changing aesthetic experience of film (and other media). I do not suggest that Benjamin or Adorno's writings on film provide either the theory or the method, but they do signpost directions to follow.

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