SUSAN BUCK-MORSS
transcription of interview, February 1996
How would you situate Walter Benjamin and the essay historically and in terms of what appears to be an aura surrounding his work?
In a certain way it's the most accessible of his writings. It's also the most ambiguous in regard to his evaluation. A lot of people read that as totally affirmative of mass culture and of the reproduction of art, and others read it in the context of others' writings as a lament about the passing of aura. As you say there is an aura surrounding
his work now. One is not sure whether that's an aura or what he called the phony personality that surrounds the star - the cult of the star. Is he a cult figure and, if so, what does this aura mean? It certainly isn't the same as that surrounded the original art work. So, it's an interesting question - difficult to answer, but it was just empirically correct. He said what was in fact going on, but what was weird is he was saying it in the mid-1930's at a time when fascism was using media in a totally undemocratic way and yet essentially he was saying there was enormous democratic potential in this reproduction of culture so that it becomes, both in
its production and its distribution, available to masses of people. So, in a certain way, that's what's so strange about the text because on the one hand it is so totally corrected by the potential and in another he's writing at a time when that potential is being used for all the wrong reasons. So, I've always found that fascinating and I think it's important to date that text as having been conceived in 1935 and then done in 1936 (written in 1936) because otherwise if students read it as if it was something published yesterday it can miss the dialectical power of that piece.
Can you say something about his style and his use of quotation and collage?
I think that the style is certainly very unique and, on the one hand, it was this concerted attempt to suppress theoretical statements and to build what normally would be considered philosophy out of pieces of text - it's a crazy idea. A close friend like Theodor Adorno would say that it never worked and perhaps it never did work, but
it's something that I use when I write now, in my own way, I think of that way - I think of it as collage; not as trying to argue theoretically or philosophically from the top down but by making certain things visible which then produce an idea like a constellation where pieces seem to resonate with each other and then out of it comes a kind of illumination. That was his goal and it's very intriguing but it isn't something so unique or only a genius could do. I have students who work that way too and the secret is that you have to be clear and it's not an obscure form of writing - it's not a hermaneutic form of writing or an esoteric form of writing, but it can be done and
it is not mechanical... but he would want to say that he was taking that kind of technology from filmmakers and modern artists and that it was a technique - it was something that could be learned and used like any other craft or technical expertise.
... if you think about images, sounds and writings as all being data then maybe we
can think about that as potential for collage in a quite different way.
The technology of CD-ROM - what it can be used for - it's potential is not something that I am totally well versed in, but surely one has the feeling that had he worked today he, at least, would have used a computer and put his bits and pieces in the computer and then pulled them out in all kinds of interesting ways. That, I think, is clear. He would have been fascinated by computers; probably even computer games. So the idea of putting one of his texts in CD-ROM form is certainly something he would have approved of and something he would probably have helped us, a great deal, in doing. And yet on the other hand, there is a tremendously conservative aspect of his research. This idea that it is something that isn't normally done with the technology like CD-ROM which is that he seldom read a book published in his own century and most of his texts were very obscure 19th century texts; things that are difficult to find at any place except at a great research library like the Bibliothèque Nationale and it seems to me that that retrieval of the past, that antiquarian, collector's mentality is as important as this trust in modern technology and it's putting those two things together that I think is necessary.
How productive is his approach to history as a way of understanding the present day?
I think it's terribly important... and I think this is something where his conceptualisation comes closest to Freud because, in Benjamin, there is this notion which in Freud is 'deferred action'. In Benjamin the notion is that the past takes on its meaning in the light of the present and that means that there is no absolute truth about the past
and that the past's true, real truth comes out only over time through the development of its potentialities and also his sense that the past can run away from us - that we can lose the past and if we do our understanding of the present is going to be totally inadequate. I think that he's absolutely right there. It frightens me the historical
amnesia that occurs and it is the other side of fashion. Fashion as the temporality of modernity means that you throw away last year's experience and last year's fashions.
So we were talking about his approach to history as a way of informing us about the present.
Yes, except there is no easy answer to that because what happens is you comb history and indeed you brush it against the grain and then certain aspects of it come out to you in the present as somehow meaningful - meaningful because of the present and not known before. There has to be this kind of flash of illumination, this flash of new understanding, and it can work except... again it's dangerous kind of thing because as soon as you say something like that people will think - You rewrite the past in the light of the present. - well, that's true. Stalin did that and Fascism did that in a way that he doesn't mean at all. For him history being the history of the conquerors is always in collusion with power; the way it's passed down to us (the way culture is passed down to us) and therefore you have to brush it against the grain to get any kind of critical power out of it and to redeem the suffering of millions of people which has been the other face of historical progress.
How then do you feel that translates to the constant talk of 'newness' in relation to technology, for instance. In relation to technological development there's always a lot of rhetoric about everything being new in some way which replaces everything that came before - you are always looking one step ahead. That seems in some contradiction to what you've been describing as his approach.
You mean in his faith in technology and his affirmation of technology?
The text itself could appear to be quite utopian so I'm just trying to think about how that may translate to the way people talk about new technologies. People talked about new technologies in 1936 as well, and how that might translate to 1996.
The thing you have to remember is for him technology was to be affirmed because of its political impact and whatever we say about fascism it was a mass movement and we are talking about mass access to forms of communication in the new technologies of which he would have approved - or he did approve at that time and he would today. So he would also be very much in favour of the Internet and the totally unregulated Internet. The distinction between the culture producers and the culture consumers becomes totally blurred, if not eliminated so that anyone can produce culture. In his time it was anyone can be a writer in a newspaper (he was thinking of the op. ed. pieces in newspapers). But the idea that the technologies of the computer now are still quite open and free and non-hierarchical - he would have been very much in favour of that. And he also was enough of a Marxist to think that in these new technologies the tendency is always toward more democratic potential. Always he would have seen this to be the case and, in fact, I think it is - that it takes effort to shore up something like computer technology as a product, a commodity for sale - that that takes effort. For instance, zeroxing simply destroys private ownership of the written word and so we have to have elaborate laws that establish that. What we're saying is that there is not only a democratic potential in these technologies, there's a socialist potential
and he would have liked that word.
That relates to the next question about the relationship between technological change and social change. You've partly answered that. What we were thinking there was about the fact the essay's often read as a technologically-determinist essay. I don't think it is in any way but we were wondering again about
the rhetoric around new technology and the inevitability of recuperation - the way capitalism as a system incorporates new forms, potentially revolutionary or socialist forms.
It's interesting because he introduces that essay by saying that nothing in this essay in the way of its aesthetic theory is usable by fascism which is an interesting claim and it's... the essay was written the year that 'Triumph of the Will' was playing in Paris - one of the most sophisticated uses of cinema to glorify a dictator, and anybody who writes enthusiastically about technology that year is mad, in a certain way. He is then brushing his contemporary history totally against the grain. That's why I think the context is so important for that article. He was not writing in the 1950's Hollywood America - he would not have written that article at that time when it was purely consumer culture industry stuff which people like his friend, Adorno, were so against. That was really a valiant argument to make, especially when the other form of technology was being used to develop bigger and better bombs that in a matter of years would be used to bomb most of the cities in Europe. Only a madman would have made that argument and he probably was a little mad. Technological determinism it
is not.
Our final question is in what ways can the politics of the essay be of use now?
I think that the significance is to look at technology as something which has a politics. Politics is not automatic. It matters how people use a technology but they surely should take it up as something that has potential for good and good in this political sense would mean for a more democratic society and, I would even say, a more socialist
society in the best sense of the word. The debates around contemporary computer use would have to be seen not as totally unprecedented. For instance, there's a lot in the Internet or in E.mail which reminds one of the telephone. When it first came into use it began to hook up people in this individual way - totally unrelated to each other in space, if not time. So there is something that is repeated here; that is not new and there are other elements of it which are new. There is always the way politics (in the sense of those who want to control that for particular reasons) use it and I think there is always a need to be resistant to those controls and what it means in the larger sense is a totally open question because what it means for a political space - what kinds of political spaces might emerge out of new technologies? We know, for instance, that the Iranian revolution made very, very effective use of video cassettes, video tapes - Newt Gingridge, in my country, makes totally effective use of this. This is again from a populist right wing political movement - a populist one. So you see how that's working again. There is this populist potential, democratic potential and then there is a manipulative leadership which is very dangerous. But it's dangerous precisely because this is popular, this is democratic and that part of even fascism is something that, because of the horrendous results of the fascist movement, no one has been able to touch the other side of fascism which is that it was popular and it was potentially participatory - in terrible ways - to participate in war, in death - in terrible ways - but it had some elements which we have to come to terms with.
So there are always two sides and you can't count on technology to take you to the good side, but you know the problem with these kinds of things is it's usually the Right that takes advantage of them rather than the Left, because the Left will tend (in the name of some pure socialism) to build in the critique of mass culture as Adorno did, for instance, which is too dismissive of the whole thing and seems to want to hearken back to an older day of good bourgeois high culture and that also has to be resisted. Benjamin put himself in the very unpopular position of being right in-between but being right - not in the political sense but in the sense of being correct. He's correct there and that has to be the kind of politics of media that the left would adopt - that is taking advantage of everything that the new technology offers but, at the same time, being aware that you can't rely on the technology to take you to a progressive result - that takes politics.
END