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75 3 Actuality, Antinomies While Kracauer’s early writings on film, mass culture, and modernity have barely entered English-language debates, Benjamin’s presence in these debates seems hopelessly overdetermined. During the past three decades, his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) may have been quoted more often than any other single source, in areas ranging from new-left theory to cultural studies, from film and art history to visual culture, from the postmodern art scene to debates on the fate of art, including film, in the digital world. In the context of these invocations, the essay has not become any less problematic than when it was first written, nor has it always acquired new meanings. “Benjamin is enjoying a boom, but does he still have actuality?”1 This question is inevitable at a time when our political, social, and personal lives seem more than ever to be driven by developments in media technology, and thus by an accelerated transformation, disintegration, and reconfiguration of the structures of experience. Indeed, if we pose the question of Benjamin’s actuality in light of the tremendous changes associated with digital technology, it could easily be argued that his theses concerning the technological media, in particular their proclaimed revolutionary potential, belong to an altogether different period than ours, and that his major prognostications have been proven wrong, at the latest with the advent of the digital and the global consolidation of capitalism.2 But to reach such a conclusion is perhaps not the reason we read Benjamin today. To begin with, Benjamin’s own, avowedly esoteric concept of Aktualität (evoked in the above quotation) should caution us not to measure him against a standard defined by the inexorable advance of media technology, especially if the latter is posited as an epistemic if not ontological apriority rather than a development inflected by economic and political conditions and cultural practices. Fusing a messianic notion of Jetztzeit, or time of the Now, with the project of a materialist historiography, Benjamin’s concept of actuality sets itself off against any unreflected contemporaneity, be it the market-driven new or the ostensibly neutral upto -date of its intellectual proponents.3 For Benjamin, actuality requires standing at once within and against one’s time, grasping the “temporal core” of the present 76 benjamin in terms other than those supplied by the period about itself (as Kracauer put it), and above all in diametrical opposition to developments taken for granted in the name of “progress.”4 Whether we dismiss Benjamin in the name of current media theory or try to assimilate him to it, we would miss out on much of his contribution to a theory of modern culture. Benjamin’s concern with film and technological media is inseparable from, on the one hand, his philosophy of history, which pivots on the question of modernity, and, on the other, his theory of the aesthetic, which encompasses both the organization of sensory perception, understood historically, and the fate of art and artistic practice in the narrower sense. In his persistent efforts to interrelate those domains, the cinema came to figure as the linchpin between the transformations of the aesthetic and the impasses of contemporary history. Unless we keep in view these larger stakes of Benjamin’s project, we cannot fully grasp what lent his reflections on film and the technological media and their paradigmatic impact on art and culture such prescience for decades to come. In tracing the complex and often contradictory logic of this project, we may gain a more nuanced and more realistic purchase on his actuality for film and media theory today. Questions of modernity, the aesthetic, and technological reproduction are nowhere as tightly entwined as in the artwork essay. As is often pointed out, Benjamin conceived of the essay in conjunction with his vast work on nineteenthcentury Paris, The Arcades Project. Their common focus, articulated most clearly in the 1935 exposé of the latter, was the effects of industrial capitalism on art and the reorganization of human sense perception. He considered the essay “most intimately related” to the historiographic project, less in terms of subject matter than in its function as a methodological device: that of an epistemological “telescope,” the building of which led him to discover “some fundamental principles of materialist art theory.”5 In a letter to Max Horkheimer, he described the artwork essay as an effort “to determine the precise point in the present to which...

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