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163 6 Micky-Maus Benjamin’s reflections on film and mass culture repeatedly revolved around Disney, in particular early Mickey Mouse cartoons and Silly Symphonies.1 Adorno took issue with Benjamin’s investment in Disney, both in direct correspondence and, implicitly, in his writings on jazz and, after his friend’s death, in the analysis of the Culture Industry in his and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. These scattered references to Disney engaged central questions concerning the politics of mass culture, the historical relations with technology and nature, the body and sexuality. They demonstrate, in an exemplary way, a mode of thinking that sought to crystallize observations on mass-cultural phenomena into a critical theory of culture and history. In this chapter, I reconstruct Benjamin’s arguments on Disney—and Adorno’s response—as a debate on these larger questions. I do not intend to reiterate the familiar pattern of adjudicating between the two writers—dismissing one as mandarin and pessimist while claiming the other for a progressive canon of film and media theory. To a degree, Adorno’s reservations about Disney highlight ambivalences in Benjamin’s own thoughts—ambivalences that speak to our own unresolved relations with technology. What is more, Benjamin himself considered their opposing views as a sign of “deep” and “spontaneous communication.” As he wrote to Adorno in June 1936, referring to the latter’s essay on jazz and his own artwork essay, “It seems to me that our respective investigations, like two searchlights trained upon the same object from opposite directions, make the contours and dimension of contemporary art recognizable in a definitely innovative and much more significant manner than anything hitherto attempted.”2 Maintaining these conflicting perspectives in a stereoscopic view seems to me a more productive way of engaging problems and possibilities of mass culture and modernity in general and, for that matter, of contemporary media culture. Nor is the point here to measure Benjamin and Adorno’s remarks on Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in terms of their critical adequacy or inadequacy toward Disney as a textual and industrial phenomenon. Rather, I am interested in the way that Disney films became emblematic of the juncture of art, politics, and technology debated at the time. The key question for Critical Theory in the interwar years 164 benjamin was which role the technological media were playing in the historic restructuring of subjectivity: whether they were giving rise to new forms of imagination, expression, and collectivity, or whether they were merely perfecting techniques of subjection and domination. In the face of fascism, Stalinism, and American-style capitalism, theorizing mass culture was a highly political effort to come to terms with new, bewildering, and contradictory forces, to map possibilities of change and prospects of survival. In this situation, the Disney films catalyzed discussions on the psychopolitics of mass-cultural reception, specifically the linkage of laughter and violence with the sadomasochistic slant of spectatorial pleasure. But to Benjamin they also suggested alternative visions of technology and the body, prefiguring a utopian mobilization of the “collective physis” and a different organization of the relations between humans and their environment. The questions that Benjamin and Adorno raised in connection with Disney point not only beyond the films but also beyond the historical context of Critical Theory. In the age of the global and digital proliferation of images and sounds, the issue of technologically generated and enhanced violence is still of paramount importance and remains one of the unresolved legacies of modernity. Now as then, the industrial-technological media constitute as much part of the problem as they do the primary public horizon through which solutions can be envisioned and fought for. Now as then, the issue pertains to the organization and politics of sensory perception, of aesthetics in the wider, etymological sense of aesthesis that Benjamin explicitly resumes. COLLECTIVE LAUGHTER: THERAPY AND TERROR In the handwritten, first draft of the artwork essay, the entire section devoted to the notion of an optical unconscious is entitled “Micky-Maus.” Where the third, familiar version meanders through a reference to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the earlier versions (including the French) open with the epigrammatic thesis “The most important among the social functions of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus.” To that effect, Benjamin stresses the importance of film not only for the manner in which human beings present themselves to the apparatus but also for their effort to represent, “to themselves,” their industrially changed environment...

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