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183 7 Play-Form of Second Nature What is lost in the withering of semblance [Schein], or decay of the aura, in works of art is matched by a huge gain in room-for-play [Spielraum]. This space for play is widest in film. —walter benjamin, “the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility: second version” The artwork essay’s rhetorical staging of a crisis that culminates in the epilogue, I argue in chapter 3, imposes a dichotomous structure upon the essay’s argument .1 It does so by pitting aura and the masses, as the subject of technological reproducibility, against each other in a binary opposition, and by aligning key concepts, such as distance and nearness, uniqueness and multiplicity/repeatability, and contemplation and distraction, with that opposition. However, just as other important concepts, in particular the optical unconscious and the notion of a simultaneously tactile and optical reception, elude this dichotomization, even the concept of aura is not entirely determined by the opposition of the masses and technology. Rather, it is complicated by a different conceptual trajectory, spelled out in the essay’s earlier versions, that makes aura part of the polarity of semblance and play [Schein und Spiel]. In this last chapter on Benjamin, I revisit the artwork essay from the perspective of Spiel, understood in its multiple German meanings as “play,” “game,” “performance ,” and “gamble.” Spiel is a term and concept, I argue, that allows Benjamin to imagine an alternative mode of aesthetics on a par with modern, collective experience, an aesthetics that could counteract, at the level of sense perception, the political consequences of the failed—capitalist and imperialist, destructive and self-destructive—reception of technology. Not least, his investment in the category of Spiel helps us better to understand why and how film came to play such a crucial role in that project. I trace this connection with the goal of exploring the possibilities of a Benjaminian theory of cinema as “play-form of second nature” (Spielform der zweiten Natur).2 184 benjamin SPIEL AND PLAY THEORY In Benjamin’s writings, the term Spiel appears in a variety of contexts, which span the range of meanings attached to the German word. His theoretical interest in Spiel in the sense of “play” is most explicit in his book reviews and exhibition reports on children’s toys (1928). In these articles he argues for a shift in focus from the toy as object (Spielzeug) to playing (Spielen) as an activity, a process in which, one might say, the toy functions as a medium.3 He develops such a notion of playing—whether the child uses toys or improvises games with material objects, detritus, and environments—in several vignettes in One-Way Street (e.g., “Child Hiding”) and “Berlin Childhood” (e.g., “The Sock,” “The Mummerehlen,” “Hiding Places”), as well as in the texts on the “mimetic faculty.” In the latter, the emphasis is on the child’s penchant for creative simulation, for pretending to be somebody or something else: “The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but also a windmill and a train” (SW 2:720). In the playful osmosis of an other, in this case a world shot through with “traces of an older generation” (SW 2:118), the child engages with an “alien . . . agenda imposed by adults” (as Jeffrey Mehlman paraphrases Benjamin), though not necessarily in ways intended or understood by them.4 However, since the child’s mimetic reception of the world of things centrally includes technology, children’s play not only speaks of generational conflict. More significantly, it elucidates the way in which “each truly new configuration of nature—and, at bottom, technology is just such a configuration”—is incorporated “into the image stock of humanity.” The cognitive experience of childhood undercuts the ideological abuse of technological progress by investing the discoveries of modernity with mythic yet potentially utopian meanings: “By the interest it takes in technological phenomena , its curiosity for all sorts of inventions and machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbols.”5 Benjamin complicates the mimetic, fictional dimension of play (“doing as if”) with an interest, following Freud, in the “dark compulsion to repeat,” the insatiable urge to do “the same thing over and over again” (SW 2:120; GS 3:131). Referring explicitly to an “impulse ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’” Benjamin attributes to repetition in play an at once therapeutic and pedagogic function: “The transformation of...

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