By FERNÃO PESSOA RAMOS*

Benjamin’s “aesthetics of war” is not only a grim diagnosis of fascism, but a disturbing mirror of our own era, where the technical reproducibility of violence is normalized in digital flows. If the aura once emanated from the distance of the sacred, today it fades into the instantaneity of the war spectacle, where the contemplation of destruction is confused with consumption.

1.

There are three stages in the composition of the aura for Walter Benjamin, when his thought approaches the sequentialism typical of the historicism of dialectical materialism.[I]

They correspond, first, to the aura as an emanation of the thing or being in mythological or religious art; then, to the aura of the bourgeois period, the beautiful appearance in which art frees itself from the representation of divinity and ritual, closing in on itself the halo of aesthetic presence in the distance that brings the unity of the envelope; and the third moment, when the question of mass art occupies the proscenium of the aura, diluting the emanation of the thing in the technological device of reproducibility, soon taken over by the commodity.

It is in this last stage that the withering of experience and the fraying of the aura occur, through the “disenchantment” that so fascinates contemporary thought.

In general, simpler analyses of the technological reproducibility of the image in Walter Benjamin tend to focus on this last aspect (as a rarefaction provided by the new medium), leaving aside the intensity of what makes immanence in the figuration of the camera-shot of the world, an instance that positively tense the aura.

Tension that affirms the oscillation of the figure through the virtuality that is inherent, for example, in the anchored intensity of the multiplication of the image of death and destruction, as constituted in the continuous acceleration of the reproducibility of new digital technologies. In reality, in Benjamin's vision, the artistic object reaches what in the masses asks for consolation.

They emerge alienated from the former proximity, lost in the reification of the aura, previously embedded in the empty beautiful appearance. The enjoyment of penetration, through the aesthetic mode, into the envelope of the transcendental unity of being, is merely a fetish.

In the third stage of materialist dialectics (that of the aura frayed by the commodity), the concept of game describes the mode of enjoyment that is appropriate to the experience of shock and inattentive enjoyment.

This enjoyment is something that the thickness of the lost aura denies, although in its poor mode of enjoyment-play, or reified mode, it can be positively enhanced in avant-garde art (Walter Benjamin analyzes the surrealists in this light, for example). There is a movement of attraction and repulsion in the aura that results from its expulsion from the social universe of the masses.

This includes both the direct function in the realization of value through the fetish of the commodity (negative character) and the impossibility of the aura in the fleeting experience of play and shock (affirmative character), the archetype of innovative aesthetic enjoyment. Mass art disregards, or is indifferent to, the uniqueness that the aura exudes, except in the critique of its recreation as a fetish.

2.

The new art of the masses, therefore, brings displaced elements focused on classical questions of aesthetics (such as the emergence of similarity and the phenomenology of beauty), or declines in the recovery of imitation, another recurring theme that now affects a work of art whose lost originality is the measure of its status as reproduction.

The question of play as an artistic component also arises in the space of “technological enervation”, a central concept in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy. The enjoyment of a work of art by the masses through the affects of play, as opposed to contemplation (and therefore absorption in the aura), can appear negatively as an impoverishing reification of the experience aimed at the realization of value.

There is, however, the positive side of the body-play element that can be actively used in the avant-garde, breaking demands of romantic aesthetics (Walter Benjamin maintains controversy about this positivity of light enjoyment with his colleagues of the future Frankfurt School).

Negative determination is inherent to play, bringing the dominant affects in children's play, as in the current video game, for example, or in the suspense of parallel editing – a central nucleus in classical cinematic language. It manifests itself in the manner of postponing a pleasure that is launched in the enjoyment of imminent risk, immediately compensated, or not, in its resolution.

The series suspended in simultaneous parallels, typical of the anguish of indeterminacy in duration, is enhanced as mimetic pleasure, thus corresponding in proximity to the affects of the game. When the work of art begins to gravitate more strongly around this affect, it provokes criticism and estrangement.

Walter Benjamin wavers at this point, recovering the body game as a particular enjoyment in modern art, but soon forgets it and makes the sun of reification appear on the horizon and the affections captured by the fascist spectacle fit in there, in procedures of exaltation.

The affective mechanism of the game around anxiety is typical of sports disputes (emerging in his time), or of betting and auction devices (which Walter Benjamin liked to frequent), but it is also central to the structuring of the classic cinematic narrative, from the beginnings to the present day.

Parallel editing (the 'meanwhile' of the cinematographic mode) is perhaps the main narrative composition developed by the history of cinema, being particular to this art [although not exclusive, as Sergei Eisenstein already noted in Dickens, Griffith and Us (Eisenstein, 1990)]. Parallel editing has its characteristic affect in the suspension of a pleasure postponed by anguish, structured in the simultaneity of the narrative consequence.

It thus expands, in repeated simultaneity, the indeterminacy of action in order to obtain the cathartic effect of the final reward of resolution through encounter, or recognition. The question of play appears critically in several writings of Walter Benjamin's generation, although occasionally opening up, as we have mentioned, to its positive effects in modern avant-garde art.

We find a certain scandal with the expansion, in art for the masses, of the space that this type of thin mimetic pleasure begins to have, as opposed to the richer enjoyment of a painting, or attentive musical listening.

3.

The last thesis of The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility (the essay is structured in theses, or chapters), is entitled, in the first version of the text, “Aesthetics of War” (Benjamin, 2013: 128). In it, Walter Benjamin radicalizes to an extreme point his vision of the manipulation of the aura by the mass culture of fascism.

It is the point of convergence at which the fetish of the extinct aura and the inattentive enjoyment (when captured by the mechanisms of collective exaltation) overlap. A compensatory axis is created for the alienated life that fits into the social absorption (“enervation”) of the displaced capitalist technology by the work of art. The affect of the fascist trance emerges as an example.

As the political framework became more pressing during the 1930s, the spectacularization of politics became a central element in the composition that Walter Benjamin called the “aesthetics of war” or, more precisely, the “apotheosis of war in fascism” (Benjamin, 2013: 97), deepening his analysis in this direction: “All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That point is war” (Benjamin, 2013: 97).

After quoting extensively from the manifesto of the Italian fascist futurist Filippo Marinetti, which calls for an aesthetic in which “war is beautiful” (“this manifesto has the advantage of clarity,” Walter Benjamin tells us with bitter irony – the term “aesthetics of war” comes from Marinetti), Walter Benjamin seems to retreat, in his thesis, to a dark point.

In it, war emerges as the ultimate form of technological liberation through extermination, an escape valve for retrograde social relations in the face of increasingly advanced productive forces, established by capital to liberate value. With the technological evolution of productive forces blocked through the “distribution of property”, war serves as an escape from pressure for the “unnatural liberation of these forces” (Benjamin, 2013: 98).

The fact that war was a valve for this outbreak “proves” that “society was not mature enough to transform technology into its organ” (“to enervate it”) (Benjamin, 2013: 98).

This is an analysis that also leaves traces in Benjamin's last text, About the concept of history, written in the early 1940s, under the real (and not just allegorical) influence of a gas mask hanging on the wall of his apartment (an object, apparently, not uncommon in Paris at the time). Walter Benjamin writes that the mask in his room appeared as “a disturbing double of those skulls with which the learned monks decorated their cell” (Eiland; Jennings, 2014: 636).

An organ specific to the technology of death, or derived from it, the gas mask shows the organicity of the technology of death for value, in the transformation of what he calls the “second technique”, now operating on nature with the end of death. Its social form is that of the emergence of affects in the mode of exalted submission of fascism, now necessary to turn value into the instrumentality of weaponry.

Technological development appears distorted, not caring, or even demanding, the elimination of the body-life in new technologies of death that adhere seamlessly to the commodity circuit.

4.

In Walter Benjamin’s view, there is a blind spot in the profane “illumination” that comes through the aura. Layers of the new technological enervation of the modern world are superimposed on it. This enervation, when exerted in the encounter with the technology of modernity, is called “second technology.”

The first technology results from the encounter of technique directly with nature to flex it into pragmatic results. Walter Benjamin defines the first technology within the plane of ritual-appearance that is guided by the “once and for all” or “irreparable sacrilege” (Benjamin, 2013: 65).

It refers to the action that expands the instant through technique, still stuck in the flow of duration, and that interacts with the becoming of nature in a functional technological interference of the first degree. The second technology extrapolates this instance through the dimension of the game and the possibility of endless repetition of the test, establishing what is synthetically defined as “once is never” or “test procedures” (Benjamin, 2013: 65).

The manipulation of the new individuation – a mode of existence, through experience, in new technological objects (such as the camera-image and its machine-like apparatus) – allows the progressive detachment of the second technology from nature. This detachment is inaugurated in the radical indeterminacy of the agency in the game, and by the random succession of the test, freed from the hook of the course and of the circumstance in necessity.

The idea of ​​the two technologies (first and second) is strong and maintains links with youth texts about the role of language as On Language in General and on the Language of Man (Benjamin, 2011), although in the formulations of maturity the most pressing dialogue with dialectical materialism is felt.

The second technology also appears in a formulation that links it to the socialist revolution, establishing the non-reified freedom of work on what it calls, deriving from it, a liberated “second nature”.

At the central layer is the issue of technical reproduction, a concept that encompasses the main axis of developments in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility. It is the mechanical reproduction multiplied by the second technology that tends cinema towards the rarefied experience and the inattentive enjoyment that The Work of Art describe.

5.

The “self-alienation” of humanity reaches its extreme degree in the “Aesthetics of War” and Walter Benjamin will experience it in greater proximity, suffering its effects in his own flesh. Extrapolated towards death, the mediation of the second technology acquires the power to permeate society in all its pores, including those in which the mimetic genius is enervated like a kind of omnipresent Leviathan.

This is how the central object of the essay arises in mimesis, or in the scene of the camera-shot of the filmic mode. The Work of Art. Walter Benjamin realizes with surprise that “it becomes possible to experience one’s own annihilation as an aesthetic delight of the first order” (Benjamin, 2013: 99), in the original intensity of the multiplied and now macabrely enjoyed take.

The aesthetic delight in the contemplation of death and self-annihilation (Benjamin compares it, wistfully, with the delight in the contemplation of humanity by the Olympian gods) is a premonitory phrase that, from the winter of 1940, approaches our contemporaneity, apparently also without fears of the barbarity of death and total war.

Necropolitics as an extreme derivation of Foucaultian biopolitics (Mbembe, 2018) today finds itself technologically enervated, so to speak, in the circuits of the camera-machine of the shot that proliferate on social networks, releasing, in the emergence of the reflex device of multiplied cameras, effects similar to the fascist spectacle, only now on a planetary scale.

In our time, or era (the “era of technological reproducibility”), we find the repercussion of this denigrated self-contemplation of humanity, permeated by the horror of multiplied armament and human and material extermination, which seems to be natural to planning in the realization of value (as the German filmmaker Harum Farocki presents it presciently in the documentary Pictures of the World and War Inscriptions/ 1987).

The now omnipresent sound-image representation of the camera-machinery in its unbound reproducibility on social networks, makes up this series. Camera shots emerge charged with a true aesthetic of annihilation by war, now commonplace or 'any'. They are charged with indifference or exaltation by herd affects, aggregated as a mode of individuation in the technological reproduction of the "nervous" machinery in each body, in each hand, and through networks.

The aura enervated by technological individuation is subject to the experience of the “insurgency of technology that demands in human material” what was denied to it by the path of social development. And it is here that Walter Benjamin locates, through one of his cutting phrases, the last stronghold of the extinguished aura in the world of technological reproducibility of the camera-image: “and in chemical warfare, it (imperialist warfare) has a new means of extirpating the aura” (Benjamin, 2013: 99).

What is the meaning of the last thesis of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility when he points to war technology as the ultimate commodity that extirpates the aura? In addition to illustrating the final turn in his thought in the face of fascist horror, these sudden leaps in Benjamin's method, with which he condenses formulations into allegorical figures, are like steady lightning bolts in a changing blue sky (the saturnine, long Benjamin, now, in 1940, has to look up). They present, together with the extinction of the aura, the radicalization of the idea of ​​reification that ceases to revolve around work for life, because now war, and is realized in this avant-scene of necropolitics. It is the value of death in the most ignoble type of social division of labor, that of extermination by chemical-technological apparatus.

An exponent of the realization of value through the reproducibility of merchandise, imperialist war composes, for Walter Benjamin, a scenario in which the aura (his beloved aura) is finally extinguished and described through an overdetermined term such as “extirpate”.

No longer the end of the romantic beautiful appearance displaced towards value (second 'bourgeois' stage of the aura); no longer the emptying of the emanations of icons and myths of origins; no longer the aura of "wonder", so Benjaminian, with the micrology of things in the optical unconscious; nor the inattentive enjoyment of the game as a cultural commodity; but, now, a perforated aura, bursting once and for all, by the value of death, the shell of its envelope of immanent thing-in-itself.

It is a kind of full stop in the oscillations that run through Walter Benjamin's work (Hansen, 2008), as an attraction and repulsion around the notion of aura. From there (from death) it, the aura, does not return, not even to the delight in self-annihilation because it is already, from now on, crossed in the mixture of the chemical weapon that dissolved it by life.

Here, the auratic emanation of proximity through distance can no longer ground itself on the edge of the old separation that it still believed could launch itself through. out-of-town of art. It ends up succumbing to its own otherness, absolute because it can no longer be reached alive.

6.

By being able to take effect through scorched earth, capital in its new qualitative turn of maximum acceleration released without restraints, conforms to what has been called brutalism (Mbembe, 2021). In this form, extreme unction, applied naturally to the dead body, definitely serves the logic of value.

Real estate developments built on death camps, ghost towns completely annihilated in ruins, streets of rubble and twisted concrete, skeletons of buildings in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, are circulating a new image of the reflex camera typology on the web.

The unbridled accumulation of concrete and iron waste, the multiplication of environmental waste, chemical debris, plastic substances covering oceans, are mismatches in the technological proliferation of abundance at this frenetic pace, displaced from the need determined in a distributive community mode of production.

The delight, or indifference, in the destruction of war fits in as a demand for the renewal of the merchandise that is rapidly piling up like trash. The transformation into value still seems to require living bodies, but, as they proliferate through virtual imitation, they become increasingly dispensable. What is new now is the possibility of generating value along the lines of the experience of death and the fact that this position is the most productive for the new biopolitics.

A "nonchalange“The way in which the far right, and other sectors of society, deal with the trivialization of death and destruction in the wars of the 21st century (or in the pandemic), clearly shows the horizon of value in the forms of advanced capitalism or in its oligarchic derivations.

At the end of his life, when he wrote the 'Aesthetics of War' as his final thesis, The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility, Walter Benjamin foresees the hot breath of what would be the factory floor in the industrial assembly lines set up around the Nazi concentration camps. Today, Palestine, and in particular the territory of Gaza, serves as a base, as a type, for the emergence of these enclosed territories in which death and target shooting of human beings (memories of Bacurau/2019) are released.

A new type of extermination camp emerges (with a touch of historical irony), serving the reason for value in the mode of annihilation, through which the reproduction of commodities establishes its current technological stage.

*Fernão Pessoa Ramos is a full professor at the Institute of Arts at UNICAMP. Author of, among other books, The Image-Camera (Papyrus). [https://amzn.to/43yKnWf]

References

Benjamin, Walter. (2011). On Language in General and on the Language of Man.In: Writings on Myth and Language (1915-1921). Organization: Gagnebin, Jeanne Marie. Translation: Susana Kampff Lages and Ernani Chaves. New York: Routledge.

 Benjamin, Walter. (2013). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Translation: Gabriel Valladão Silva. Organization, preface and notes: Seligmann-Silva, Márcio. Porto Alegre: L&PM.

Eiland, Howard; Jennings, Michael W. (2014). Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Eisenstein, Sergei. (1990). Dickens, Griffith and Us. In: The Form of the Film. Translation Teresa Ottoni. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. (2008). Benjamin's Aura. Critical Inquiry, v. 34, no. 2, pp. 336-375.

Mbembe, Achille. (2018). Necropolitics: biopower, sovereignty, state of exception, politics of death. Translation: Renata Santini. New York: N-1 Editions.

Mbembe, Achille. (2021). Brutalism. Translation by Sebastian Nascimento. New York: N-1 Editions.

Nota

[I] This article can be read as a continuation of “Walter Benjamin and Blanqui’s Cosmology”, posted on the website The Earth is Round. Available at https://aterraeredonda.com.br/walter-benjamin-e-a-cosmologia-de-blanqui/

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