West Chester University Digital Commons @ West Chester University

English Faculty Publications English

4-2006 From Reproduction to Reproducibility: Creativity and Technics in Benjamin and Arendt Graham MacPhee West Chester University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, and the Theory and Criticism Commons

Recommended Citation MacPhee, G. (2006). From Reproduction to Reproducibility: Creativity and Technics in Benjamin and Arendt. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2(1), 65-74. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/17

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Digital Commons @ West Chester University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ West Chester University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 11 number 1 april 2006

The origin of [modern] technology lies at a point where, by an unconscious ruse, human beings first began to distance themselves from nature. It lies, in other words, in play. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,’’ Second version (1936), Selected Writings, vol. 3, 107 ithealways-newastheever-same here is an unacknowledged paradox in many graham macphee Trecent descriptions of modern technology. The impact of imminent technological develop- ments is often described as ‘‘unprecedented,’’ as presaging fundamental changes that will inun- FROM REPRODUCTION date, overwhelm or saturate inherited parameters TO REPRODUCIBILIT Y of perception and understanding to such an extent that existing patterns of social interaction creativity and technics in and political organization will be swept away. Yet the explication of technology’s ‘‘unprecedented’’ benjamin and arendt effect imagines it primarily in terms that reproduce existing features of social experience, albeit in more intensified or extensive ways.1 the openness and unpredictability of what she Such claims to articulate the unprecedented calls ‘‘action.’’ As such, it might potentially nature of modern technology fail to identify provide an important resource for thinking the how reproduction might introduce anything that political implications of modern technology: for is qualitatively new; they fail to account for that just as contemporary assessments of technology element of newness within repetition that initiates are characterized by a failure to think the impact or inaugurates, or what Hannah Arendt had of technology beyond notions of reproduction described as that ‘‘element of the ‘miraculous’ and intensification, so they tend to envisage the present in all reality [which ensures] that events, political consequences of technology in terms of no matter how well anticipated in hope or fear, static repetition, generating dystopian scenarios 3 strike us with shock and surprise once they come of disempowerment and loss of agency. In to pass.’’2 contrast, Arendt’s emphasis on the moment of Arendt’s concern for ‘‘newness’’ is associated newness in political action – and for Arendt it in her work with the concept of ‘‘natality,’’ and is speech that is the most significant form of underlies her understanding of politics as crea- political action – suggests the possibility of tive, as an intersubjective realm constituted by rethinking the interplay of politics and technics

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/010065^10 ß 2006 Taylor & Francis Gruop DOI:10.1080/09697250600797898

65 creativity and technics not simply in terms of reproduction but also Reproduzierbarkeit (1935–36) – particularly vul- through the matrix of creativity. nerable to being assimilated to the various However, if Arendt’s concept of natality intellectual movements and concerns that have suggests a different relationship between politics, traversed the Anglo-American academy over this technics and creativity, this is not to say that period. The publication in recent years of a Arendt’s writing necessarily pursues this avenue. relatively wide selection of Benjamin’s authorship Indeed, in her often insightful but highly in translation provides the resources for chal- problematic work The Human Condition lenging this assimilation, which is, after all, (1958), Arendt rejects this possibility from the a reduction of the productivity and potentiality outset. Responding to calls for a reinvention of of Benjamin’s text. The aim of this study is not the political through an ‘‘adjust[ment of] our to propose an ‘‘authentic’’ reading of Benjamin’s cultural attitudes to the present status of essay, that is, not to restore its meaning ‘‘as it scientific achievement,’’ she insists that ‘‘if we once really was’’; rather, it is to follow Benjamin’s follow th[is] advice ...we would in all earnest demand in ‘‘The Task of the Translator’’ (1922) adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer for a literal rendering of the text, which meaningful.’’4 For Arendt, the impulse to punctures the placid appearance of the present rejuvenate the political by way of its negotiation by returning into it the unfamiliar conjunctions with technology would bring not the reinvention and relationships that lie embedded in the of politics but its liquidation. original.7 Given this rejection, it is striking that a different relationship between politics, technics ii newness and the fate of the world and creativity was anticipated by a thinker whose most celebrated work on technology pre-dates The central concern of The Human Condition is The Human Condition by some two decades, to provide the basis for an enriched account of namely Walter Benjamin. Arendt not only knew the political, which Arendt saw as a priority in the of Benjamin’s work – her 1968 essay on Benjamin wake of her analysis of the modern propensity played an important role in introducing Benjamin to violence in The Origins of Totalitarianism to the English-speaking world – but they struck (1951). Consequently, discussion of technology is up a warm, if brief, friendship as fellow refugees embedded within the larger architectonic of the in Paris in the late 1930s.5 But like much of the work, which pursues an examination of what anglophone reception of Benjamin in which Arendt calls the ‘‘vita activa.’’ While this term she played a part, Arendt fails to register the suggests that the pivotal conceptual opposition radicality of Benjamin’s thinking of technics and will be with the ‘‘vita contemplativa’’ that creativity. This failure is in turn instructive for occupies her posthumously published The Life thinking the categorical framework of The of the Mind (1978), in fact the conceptual terrain Human Condition, both in terms of its abstract of the study is organized primarily around a opposition of ‘‘action,’’ ‘‘work’’ and ‘‘labor,’’ and threefold distinction within the vita activa, in its underestimation of the modern philosophi- between ‘‘labor,’’ ‘‘work’’ and ‘‘action.’’ cal engagement with technology initiated by This strong conception of the political rests on Hegel.6 the notion of action developed in the fourth part Since the 1960s the anglophone reception of of The Human Condition: ‘‘The polis, properly Benjamin has been marked by a reliance on a speaking,’’ Arendt writes there, ‘‘is not the city- very limited number of translated works, state in its physical location; it is the organization whereby individual essays have achieved a of the people as it arises out of acting and prominence that isolates them from the complex speaking together’’ (HC 198). What she wants us web of Benjamin’s intellectual engagements. to understand by action centers not on human In turn, this isolation has made such texts – activity per se but on the element of creation, and in particular Benjamin’s most famous essay, initiation and newness that can arise only there; Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen and crucially, she sees this element of creativity

66 macphee as intrinsic to the human condition because of the a fleeting but ‘‘never successfu[l]’’ possibility of biological fact of birth: the workers’ movement (HC 216). The very terms which make political action so valuable for To act, in its most general sense, means to take Arendt are those which make it so vulnerable, an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word a vulnerability that emerges once placed in archein, ‘‘to begin,’’ ‘‘to lead,’’ and eventually relation to her two other classifications of ‘‘to rule,’’ indicates), to set something in human activity – ‘‘work’’ and ‘‘labor’’; and it is motion. Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take the specifically modern reformulation of the initiative and are prompted into relationship of action, work and labor in action. ...With the creation of man, the technology that underlies the political pessimism principle of beginning came into the world, of The Human Condition, notwithstanding its which, of course, is only another way of saying attempt to stake out and defend a strong concept that the principle of freedom was created when of the political.8 man was created but not before. (HC 177) Although Arendt’s discussion of the ‘‘frailty’’ of the political realm suggests that its vulner- In coining her neologism ‘‘natality,’’ Arendt ability lies in the very boundlessness of political seeks to capture the fundamentally human action, the cumulative argument of The Human character of this capacity for creation, which is Condition locates the most significant threat not both the basis for politics and the reason why the in the inherently excessive character of ‘‘the end of politics is freedom: ‘‘action as beginning human condition’’ but in nature, or what is ... corresponds to the fact of birth, it is the termed ‘‘earth.’’9 Notwithstanding the opening actualization of the human condition of natality’’ claim of The Human Condition that ‘‘earth is the (HC 178). And because ‘‘with each birth some- very quintessence of the human condition,’’ its thing uniquely new comes into the world,’’ then argument is organized around an existential each person ‘‘is unique,’’ which for Arendt points opposition of the human to nature. It is the to ‘‘the essential human condition of plurality, task of what Arendt calls ‘‘the human artifice of the acting and speaking together, which is the the world’’ to ‘‘separat[e] human existence from condition of all forms of political organization’’ all mere animal environment’’ (HC 2); indeed, (HC 178, 202). without such ‘‘a world,’’ Arendt insists, ‘‘there The unprecedented, creative and plural char- would be nothing but changeless eternal recur- acter of action underpins Arendt’s valorization of rence, the deathless everlastingness of the human politics, since political action is now understood as of all other animal species’’ (HC 97). The as both ‘‘boundless’’ and ‘‘unpredictable.’’ Even ramifications of this opposition are multiplied ‘‘the smallest act in the most limited circum- because Arendt’s nature inhabits the human stances,’’ Arendt insists, ‘‘bears the seed of the itself: nature includes the ‘‘life process’’ – or same boundlessness, because one deed, and physiological metabolism – and the emotional sometimes one word, suffices to change every disposition of the human organism, as well as the constellation’’ (HC 190). As such, the ‘‘full inanimate and animate world which would sustain meaning’’ of a political act cannot be predicted this organism. The human is therefore riven by a or foretold, but ‘‘can reveal itself only when it has deep opposition between what Arendt calls ended’’ (HC 192). However, this means that ‘‘animal laborans’’ – that dimension of being political action is by its very nature fleeting and centered on the reproduction of biological or fragile, and Arendt pointedly talks of ‘‘the frailty ‘‘natural’’ life – and ‘‘zoon politikon’’ – the of human affairs’’ (HC 188). Indeed, the properly human condition initiated by acting and genuinely ‘‘new form of government’’ that speaking together (HC 22–23). Arendt recommends for the modern world – as The conflict between nature and the human opposed to the Greek polis which remains a configures Arendt’s distinction between ‘‘action’’ central theoretical model despite its antiquity – is and ‘‘labor,’’ opposing the former as a creation ‘‘the system of people’s councils’’ which arose as ex nihilo to the latter’s sterile reproduction.

67 creativity and technics

Underlying this opposition are two different everlastingness ...of all other animal species’’ temporalities: action initiates and creates, intro- (HC 97). From the standpoint of human beings, ducing ‘‘newness’’ into the ‘‘changeless eternal Arendt argues, ‘‘the most important task of recurrence’’ of nature from the outside, as it were human artifice is to offer a dwelling place more (HC 97); labor, on the other hand, is fundamen- permanent and more stable than themselves,’’ tally tied to satisfying the biological needs of the understood as biological beings or animal ‘‘animal laborans,’’ and so the temporality of laborans (HC 152). For ‘‘[w]ithout a world labor replicates ‘‘the rhythmic repetition of the between men and nature,’’ she insists, ‘‘there is life process and its metabolism with nature,’’ eternal movement, but no objectivity,’’ and so reproducing the same again and again (HC 146). human action cannot be revealed, recognized or Thus, the repetitive rhythm of labor menaces the remembered.10 The fleeting nature of praxis, very creativity that defines the human, since it then, requires a poiesis to build a world that will insinuates within human activity the eternal outlast it: zoon politikon requires homo faber to return of nature or ‘‘earth,’’ so threatening the erect the public space within which action can absorption of the human within ‘‘the deathless appear. everlastingness ...of all other animal species’’ It is at this stage that The Human Condition (HC 97). Because it reproduces within human considers modern technology, placing its discus- activity the cyclical reproduction of nature, sion at the heart of the book’s attempt to think according to Arendt ‘‘animal labor- politics in modernity; but as such it inherits the ans ...remains the servant of nature and the contradictions and elisions bound up in Arendt’s earth’’ (HC 139). opposition of a human creativity to the reproduc- Like labor, but in marked contrast to action, tion of nature. The importance that Arendt ‘‘work’’ is based not on creation but on assigns to the fabrication of a ‘‘world’’ in her reproduction; however, crucially for The attempt to develop a strong concept of the Human Condition, work is understood to political might suggest that her approach implies manifest a different kind of reproduction, one the need for a negotiation between praxis and that reproduces not nature but a preexisting idea. poiesis, or politics and technics. However, The Because labor’s ‘‘repetition is urged upon [it] and Human Condition rules out the possibility of remains subject to the biological cycle,’’ it such a negotiation by characterizing modern involves the reproduction of ‘‘the needs and technology as ineluctably bound to the degraded wants of the human body’’ which, even ‘‘though reproduction of labor. Yet in describing the fate they reappear again and again at regular inter- of modernity, The Human Condition offers a vals,’’ ‘‘come and go’’ and ‘‘never remain for any profoundly contradictory account of modern length of time.’’ This ephemeral reproduction of technology, which despite itself must accord to the ephemeral is dismissed as ‘‘mere repetition’’ technology an element of creation (HC 148). In by Arendt, in favor of the ‘‘multiplication’’ she describing technology as both reproductive and locates in work. ‘‘Multiplication, in distinction creative, Arendt’s text suggests the possibility of from mere repetition,’’ she writes, ‘‘multiplies a different configuration of the relationship something that already possesses a relatively between praxis and poiesis, or between politics stable, relatively permanent existence in the and technics. world’’ (HC 142); that is, work converts The central charge against modern technology the permanent impermanency of earth into the in The Human Condition is that it converts relative permanence of what Arendt calls the cumulative reproduction characteristic of ‘‘world,’’ by refashioning nature within the work – which grants a relative permanence to coordinates of a properly human design. objects – into the ephemeral reproduction of ‘‘World,’’ according to Arendt, is the ‘‘human labor, where the product is simply consumed; artifice’’ that ‘‘separates human existence from all thus, in the shift from tools to automatic mere animal environment’’ (HC 2); it is the machines there is a shift from a linear temporality barrier between the human and ‘‘the deathless that enables the accretion of a world, to the

68 macphee cyclical and empty eternal return of biological degrading the cumulative reproduction of work consumption. What underpins the secret affinity to the ephemeral reproduction of labor; but as between modern technology and nature is a Arendt must in part concede, what is perhaps shared temporal organization based on rhythmic more frightening is that the operation of repetition: ‘‘nothing can be mechanized more technology exceeds reproduction. Despite the easily and less artificially than the rhythm of the typographical cordon sanitaire of quotation labor process,’’ writes Arendt, ‘‘which in turn marks, Arendt nominates the power of tech- corresponds to the equally automatic repetitive nology as creation, because rather than simply rhythm of the life process and its metabolism reproducing nature, technology ‘‘unchain[s] with nature’’ (HC 146). Modern technology natural processes ...which would never have marks the predominance not of homo faber but happened without [it]’’ (HC 148). of animal laborans, who ‘‘does not use tools and In addition to typography, The Human instruments in order to build a world but in order Condition deploys a conceptual cordon sani- to ease the labors of its own life processes’’; taire in its insistence that the intrusion of in bringing about ‘‘the emancipation of labor,’’ nature remains within reproduction since nature then, technology ‘‘supplant[s] human labor is fixed: consequently, it argues, the infusion of power with the superior power of natural its elementary powers can only be the eternal forces’’ (HC 147). return of the same. Yet Arendt warns that ‘‘if At the same time, however, The Human present technology consists of channeling Condition also suggests a more complex account natural forces into the world of human artifice, of technology that exceeds the terms of reproduc- future technology may yet consist of channeling tion. In the initial stages of industrialization, the universal forces of the cosmos around us technology is ‘‘still characterized by an imitation into the nature of the earth,’’ so transforming of natural processes’’ (HC 148); but in the shift to ‘‘the household of nature as we have known it electrically powered automation, a qualitative since the beginning of our world’’ (HC 150). change is identified: But the future may already be here, for in criticizing the design of consumer goods Arendt This stage can no longer be described in terms concedes that their ‘‘shape’’ is based neither on of a gigantic enlargement and continuation of ‘‘human standards of utility of beauty’’ nor the old arts and crafts. ...For here we no merely on the ‘‘basic functions’’ of the life longer use material as nature yields it to us, process, but ‘‘depend[s] entirely upon the killing natural processes or interrupting or imitating them. In all these instances, we capacity of the machine’’ (HC 152). That is, changed and denaturalized for our own she concedes that their structuring is open for worldly ends, so that the human world or invention beyond the static reproduction of artifice on the one hand and nature on the world or earth, since in the machine the very other remained two distinctly separated enti- coordinates of space and time may themselves ties. Today we have begun to ‘‘create,’’ as it be reinvented. were, that is to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surround- iii technik beyond the work of art ing the human artifice with defenses against If The Human Condition finds the durability of nature’s elementary forces, keeping them as human artifice to be threatened in the work of the far as possible outside the man-made world, world, it locates a more comforting permanence we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself. in the work of art. Because it is ‘‘removed (HC 148–49; emphasis added) from the exigencies and wants of daily life,’’ art is described as having ‘‘survived gloriously Ostensibly, what is threatening about modern its severance from religion, magic and myth’’ technology is that it ‘‘channels’’ the ‘‘elementary (HC 167).11 Arendt interprets this ‘‘survival’’ power’’ of nature into the human world, as ‘‘a durability [that] is almost untouched by

69 creativity and technics the corroding effects of natural processes,’’ a rendering that suggests a static or identical a ‘‘durability’’ that duplication. Underlying the essay’s account of the ‘‘decay is of a higher order than that which all things of aura’’ is a broader reconceptualization of need in order to exist at all; it can attain experience that seeks to avoid the opposition a permanence throughout the ages. In between technology and a properly human this permanence, the very stability of artifice or technique, a paradigm which, as we the human artifice, which, being inhabited and used by mortals, can never be have seen, structures The Human Condition.As absolute, achieves a representation of its Julian Roberts has pointed out, Benjamin does own. Nowhere else does the sheer durability this by exploiting the ambiguity of the German of the world of things appear in such word Technik, whose meaning includes two purity and clarity, nowhere else does distinct senses that in English are expressed by this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly the terms ‘‘technique’’ and ‘‘technology,’’ respec- as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. tively. Thus, as Roberts observes, ‘‘a piece of (HC 167–68) machinery is Technik, and so are the methods and organisations used to exploit it.’’14 According ‘‘It is as though worldly stability had become to Howard Caygill, this extended usage is transparent in the work of art,’’ Arendt writes designed to overcome the traditional opposition (HC 168; emphasis added). But, of course, this between the ‘‘spiritual’’ and the ‘‘material’’ by statement remains an ‘‘as if’’: for as the text conceiving of Technik ‘‘as a medium of organiza- repeatedly confirms, ‘‘worldly stability’’ is avail- tion which pattern[s] experience while being able ‘‘nowhere else.’’ reciprocally subject to change in the face of The extraordinary significance ascribed to art experience.’’15 As a way of describing the in The Human Condition – a work concerned organization of experience, Technik not only primarily with developing a richer account of the designates an apparatus like the camera or ‘‘visual political, and not with aesthetics – is thus a technics’’ such as drawing or painting, but also function of the pessimism that haunts its vision of pre-modern ways of relating to nature such as the fate of the world in technology. Conversely, ritual or magic. the critique of the work of art developed by Benjamin’s new concept of Technik therefore Walter Benjamin in ‘‘The Work of Art in the marks a considerable extension of what we Age of its Technological Reproducibility’’ is best normally think of as ‘‘technology,’’ a point that understood as an engagement with what we might is made clear in the first and second versions of describe in Arendtian terms as the fate of the the Work of Art essay, but which is elided in the world as a context for political action – rather third version. Thus, in the second version of the than primarily a work of aesthetics in the post- essay Benjamin describes both film and magic Romantic sense. Indeed, as Benjamin makes as forms of Technik, in that they each constitute clear, its account of the historically changing a particular way of organizing the relationship experience of art ‘‘is symptomatic,’’ and ‘‘its between humanity and the phenomenal world, or significance extends far beyond the realm of what the essay terms ‘‘nature.’’ However, if 12 art.’’ However, in English-speaking cultural both are designated as instances of ‘‘technology,’’ criticism the essay’s exploration of the radical the essay insists on a radical difference between consequences of modern technology has been them, a difference reflected terminologically obscured by a preoccupation with a concept of in the distinction between what is called the ‘‘aura’’ removed from the broader conceptual ‘‘first technology’’ of myth and magic, and the context of Benjamin’s thinking.13 This tendency ‘‘second technology’’ of modernity. This distinc- has been encouraged by the availability, until tion is elaborated in terms of two different recently, of only the last version of the essay temporalities that emerge from the historically in English, and by the translation’s prominent variable relation between humanity and the use of the phrase ‘‘mechanical reproduction,’’ phenomenal world.

70 macphee

According to Benjamin, magic emerged as a photography and film in lithography, which is response to ‘‘the requirements of a society whose seen to mark ‘‘an essentially new stage’’ since it technology existed only in fusion with ritual’’ – not only allows the production of ‘‘large numbers that is, a technology that was tied to the repetition [of copies] as previously’’ but also produces them of natural forms in order to master and control ‘‘in daily changing variations’’ (SW 102; them. Consequently, ‘‘the results of [this] first emphasis added). In the essay’s discussion of technology [appear as] valid once and for all’’ photography and film this transformation is since ‘‘it deals with irreparable lapse or sacrificial explored both in terms of the arrangement of death, which holds good for eternity’’; that is, the phenomenal world and in terms of the first technology remains tied to the configuration coordinates of perception. The photograph ‘‘can of space and time given by a nature whose cycles put the copy ...in situations which the original appear fixed and eternal. In contrast, the second itself cannot attain,’’ while through the processes technology of modernity emerges ‘‘when human of enlargement and slow motion, the camera can beings first began to distance themselves from ‘‘record images which escape natural optics nature,’’ a distance understood as freedom from altogether,’’ so reformulating the very spatio- the reproduction of natural forms, or from the temporal parameters of human perception givenness of spatio-temporal configuration; ‘‘It (SW 103). lies, in other words,’’ Benjamin writes, ‘‘in play’’ What are also occluded when the essay is read (SW 107). Thus, the historical development of through the frame of ‘‘reproduction’’ are the technology involves a fundamental reformulation different political possibilities that are opened up of the transcendental structure of experience, by the new spatio-temporal condition signaled by which marks a shift from the static spatio- ‘‘reproducibility.’’ Benjamin argues that ‘‘the temporal framework of myth to a new condition first technology really sought to master nature’’ characterized by the mutability of space and time. because it lacked its inventive or productive As such, the central feature of this second power, and so in a sense always remained technology is not reproduction, or repetition subordinate to it (SW 107). For Benjamin, the with a fixed spatio-temporal framework, but unprecedented reformulation of space and time reproducibility, or the reinvention of the coordi- that Marx had identified in the Grundrisse and nates of space and time in each moment of Capital had not been met with corresponding ‘‘repetition.’’16 In ‘‘play’’ repetition is at the same changes in the modes of organization of social time reinvention, as exemplified by film, where experience – or the social, political and legal images are not simply reproduced according to ‘‘technics’’ of the modern nation-state. Thus, preexisting spatio-temporal coordinates, but while the phenomenal world was being reorga- ‘‘are assembled according to a new law’’ nized according to new rhythms of acceleration (SW 116; emphasis added). and configurations of spatial porosity, the We miss the historical specificity of modern political and social structures of right, possession, technology, therefore, if we privilege technologi- belonging and exclusion remained rigidly bound cal reproduction at the expense of the new to an organization of space and time modeled on element of ‘‘play’’ contained within it. However, the self-identity of an integral and enduring the essay is routinely read as being concerned Being. As a consequence, they can be maintained primarily with a shift from handcraft to only through an increasingly violent subordina- ‘‘mechanical reproduction,’’ and therefore as tion of the mutability and porosity of social implying an ‘‘age’’ of electronic reproduction to experience, a subordination manifested at the come; each ‘‘age’’ is then in turn associated with a level of perception as ‘‘aura.’’ particular set of technologies that would corre- Yet the unprecedented productive potential of spond to it: sculpture and painting; photography the second technology means that such an and film; digital video or computer-generated imperative to domination is no longer necessary, imagery. But in fact the decisive shift from first in the sense that it has become practically to second technology begins to emerge prior to possible to envisage a reciprocal ‘‘interplay

71 creativity and technics between nature and humanity.’’ Instead of However, in the earlier text the fate of modern positing the absolute incommensurability of politics was located within the global reorganiza- technology and a ‘‘properly human’’ action, tion of the space and time of social experience; Benjamin looked to technology itself as the in The Human Condition, on the other hand, ‘‘schema’’ or matrix that would reinvent the a formal concept of the political is opposed to very terms of this relation. The central signifi- the mutability of space and time through the cance of film in the Work of Art essay lies in its opposition of ‘‘action’’ to a technology that can capacity to figure a different kind of response to only be the reduction of ‘‘work’’ to ‘‘labor.’’19 the mutability of space and time in technology – In this context, the fate of the world is sealed by albeit at the level of perception. Instead of the ineluctably cyclical character of technology’s appealing to tradition or to a notion of the reproduction. Such an abstraction of politics ‘‘properly human’’ to organize interpretation in from social experience may have unintended the face of technological modernity, the technol- consequences: for if political action – which ogy of film generates a perceptual matrix that can Arendt identifies with the spontaneous workers’ respond to the porosity and transitivity of the councils of modern popular protest and specifi- phenomenal world without fixing it within a static cally the workers’ movement – is cast as transcendental framework. Thus, rather than inevitably unsuccessful, then such a concept of opposing the transitivity of second technology the political becomes an unattainable ‘‘ought,’’ with the fixed coordinates inherited from the first leaving the flawed ‘‘republic’’ as the best worst technology, the spatio-temporal openness of film option available.20 Thus, notwithstanding offers a response that is reciprocal. Film therefore Arendt’s powerful invocation of the creativity points to different political, social, and legal of politics, we may be left with the eternal return technics that would, in the words of another of the same. essay, move ‘‘to correct the incapacity of peoples Benjamin’s concept of Technik offers a to order their relationships to one another in significant alternative in this respect, since its accord with the relationship they possess to account of reproducibility requires us to think nature through their technology.’’17 technology beyond reproduction. If Arendt’s But if this possibility is made practicable in notion of the political threatens to ossify in the modern technology, that is not to say that it will formalism of ‘‘the republic,’’ Benjamin’s concept be realized. On the contrary, as Benjamin notes, of Technik – which marks the violent disparity in fact we persist in ‘‘viewing the second between the technological reorganization of the technology in terms of the first’’ – that is, we phenomenal world and our inherited configura- persist in ‘‘describ[ing] the goal of the second tions of value and meaning – requires that we technology as ‘mastery over nature’’’ (SW 107). think the creativity of the political in relation As such, Benjamin’s Technik marks a violently both to the reproduction and the reinvention of unstable disjunction that runs through the social experience in global technology. political and social fabric of modernity. Yet if this is true, there remains a significant lacuna in Benjamin’s difficult leap from the iv the politics of creativity perceptual experience of film to the reinvention of politics, a lacuna that harks back to Benjamin’s In the wake of her analysis of modernity’s problematic account of the political in ‘‘Critique propensity to violence in The Origins of of Violence’’ (1921).21 For if film makes possible Totalitarianism, Arendt’s claim in The Human an image-world open to assembly under ‘‘a new Condition that the ‘‘polis, properly speaking, is law’’ in the spontaneity of collective reception, not the city-state in its physical location’’ but this reception nonetheless takes place within ‘‘the organization of people as it arises out of accumulated networks of inequality and power speaking and acting together’’ was designed to which press upon and shape the spontaneity of underpin a strong account of the political by legislation (SW 116). In that case, this spon- separating it from what she calls ‘‘the social.’’18 taneous legislation will be determined by a

72 macphee disposition that cannot be distinguished, known 7Benjamin,Selected Writings,vol.1,253^63. or evaluated, other than through abstract pola- 8 ‘‘Pessimism’’ is used here in a technical rather rities such as ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new,’’ ‘‘permanent’’ and than capricious sense: it is not that Arendt fore- ‘‘transitory,’’ or indeed ‘‘fascism’’ and ‘‘com- sees a future decline within an open interpretative munism’’ (SW 122). Benjamin’s rethinking of paradigm, but rather that the interpretative cate- technology, therefore, still requires a developed gories she puts in place seal the future as a ‘‘fate’’ concept of the political through which the politics that is non-negotiable. of creativity can be negotiated. For unless the 9Cf.The Origins of Totalitarianism 301^ 02: in the creativity of the polis is accompanied by a means retrospective light of The Human Condition,the of orientation that can register the shifting global threat of an exponentially increasing population topography of inequality and of superfluous people risks appearing automatic ^ injustice, the spontaneity of its literally built in to modern technology. legislation may unwittingly 10 HC137; for Arendt’s account of the political as reproduce this inequality and revelatory see HC178 ^ 88. injustice again and again. 11 For Benjamin, in contrast, the decay of tradi- tion does not straightforwardly erase the origin of art in ritual, but gives it a new and unexpected notes significance: see Selected Writings,vol.3,105^06; An earlier version of parts of section iii appeared cited hereafter as SW. in ‘‘Glass Before its Time, Premature Iron: 12 B enjamin, S W 10 4. The Unforeseeable Futures of Technology in Benjamin’s Arcades Project,’’ New Formations 54 13 For a fuller consideration of ‘‘aura’’see Graham (winter2004^05). MacPhee, ‘‘Technology, Time and the Return of Abstract Painting.’’ 1 For an analysis of recent approaches in cultural theory that function in these terms see 14 Julian Roberts,Walter B enjamin 157. Graham MacPhee, The Architecture of the Visible, 15 Howard Caygill, Walter B enjamin 96. The argu- chapter 2. ment presented here draws on Caygill’s rereading 2HannahArendt,Between Past and Future170. of Benjamin’s thinking in terms of a ‘‘transcen- dental but speculative philosophy’’ (4). 3SeeMacPhee, Architecture of the Visible, chapter 2, esp. 72^76,100 ^ 03. 16 Just as the significance of creativity for Benjamin’s thinking of technology has tended to 4Arendt,The Human Condition 3^ 4; hereafter be ignored in anglophone cultural theory, so con- cited as HC. versely has the importance of technology for his 5 Arendt,‘‘Walter Benjamin: 1892^1940.’’A sense thinking of creativity.Thus, in his ‘‘Infinite Spaces’’ of the warmth of their friendship, and of Marc Cauchi fails to consider the complexity of Benjamin’s appreciation of Arendt’s intellect, can Benjamin’s account of technology, seeing only the be gleaned from Benjamin’s letters; see Benjamin, reductive opposition of ‘‘the bourgeois logic of The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910^1940 eternal recurrence’’and a‘‘creation ex nihilo’’ (24). 596, 601. Arendt was, of course, the editor of 17 B enjamin, Selected Writings,vol.2,320. the first selection of Benjamin’s essays in English, Illuminations,publishedin1968.This 18 HC 198; for Arendt’s account of the social see highly influential collection follows the 1955 HC 22^73. Suhrkamp selection of Benjamin’s writing edited 19 Notwithstanding Arendt’s later insistence on by Adorno, which includes only the third version the purity of politics, part 2 of The Origins of of the Work of Art essay. Totalitarianism,‘‘Imperialism,’’ locates the reformu- 6Seeesp.G.W.F.Hegel,Hegeland The Human Spirit. lation of modern politics within the spatial and For an accountof Hegel’s engagement with politics temporal organization of the globe: see esp. and technology,see Fine, Political Investigations. 123 ^ 57.

73 creativity and technics

20 Kant’s formulation of morality as an ‘‘ought’’ is Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of the subject of Hegel’s sustained critique: for a Experience. London: Routledge,1998. statement of this critique see Hegel, The Fine, Robert. Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx and Phenomenology of Spirit,sect.618,374^75.Arendt’s Arendt. London: Routledge, 2001. ‘‘Reflections on Little Rock’’ (1959) and On Revolution (1963) both indicate that in the signifi- Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel and The Human Spirit: A cant instance of the USA, her account of the Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of ‘‘republic’’ proves unable to sustain the analysis of Spirit (1805^6). Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP,1983. the involvement of the ‘‘internal’’ space of politics Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit.Oxford: in the reformulation of the globe begun in The Oxford UP,1977. Origins of Totalitarianism. MacPhee, Graham. The Architecture of the Visible. 21 ‘‘Critique of Violence’’ in Benjamin, Selected London: Continuum, 2002. Writings, vol. 1, 236^52. For a critique of Benjamin’s essay see Caygill,Walter B enjamin 27^29. MacPhee, Graham. ‘‘Glass Before its Time, Premature Iron: The Unforeseeable Futures of Technology in Benjamin’s Arcades Project.’ ’ New Formations 54(2004^05):74^90. bibliography MacPhee, Graham. ‘‘Technology, Time and the Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future.1961. Return of Abstract Painting.’’ Critical Perspectives New York: Penguin,1977. on Contemporary Painting. Ed. Jonathan Harris. Liverpool: Liverpool UP/Tate Liverpool, 2003. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition.Chicago: 109 ^37. UofChicagoP,1958. Roberts, Julian. Walter B enjamin.London: Arendt, Hannah. TheLifeoftheMind.NewYork: Macmillan,1982. Harvest,1978. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism.1951. New York: Meridian,1958. Arendt, Hannah. ‘‘Reflections on Little Rock.’’ Responsibility and Judgment.NewYork:Schocken, 2003.192^213. Arendt, Hannah.On Revolution. New York: Penguin, 19 91. Arendt, Hannah. ‘‘Walter Benjamin: 1892^1940.’’ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations.NewYork: Schocken,1968.1^51. Benjamin, Walter. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910^1940.Chicago:UofChicagoP,1994. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Trans. R. Livingstone et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap- Harvard UP,1996. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings.Vol.2. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP,1999. Graham MacPhee Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings.Vol.3. Department of English Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2002. West Chester University of Pennsylvania Cauchi, Marc. ‘‘Infinite Spaces: Walter Benjamin West Chester, PA 19383 and the Spurious Creations of Capitalism.’’ USA Angelaki 8.3 (2003): 23^39. E-mail: [email protected]