On Walter Benjamin's "The Author as Producer"

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In “The Author as Producer” (1934) Walter Benjamin sets out to diagnose the relation between artistic production and politics broadly conceived. He argues that there is a necessary connection between the techniques used in the production of a work of art and its political orientation and, therefore, the impossibility of a disinterested, autonomous or non-political art work. Interestingly, although Benjamin is now often thought of as a highly unorthodox Marxist (see Richter 2002, 12; Hafstein 2006, 13), here he displays a quite close alignment with orthodox Marxism in his insistence on the clarity of a work’s political tendencies, the dangers of “counterrevolutionary” acts, the inextricable link between one’s “position in the process of production” and one’s political identity, the valorization of Brecht’s explicitly “committed” theatre works and the extolling of the virtues, in ostensibly overcoming social antinomies, of cultural production in the Soviet Union. Whether such an interpretation suggests a wider transformation in Benjamin’s Marxism from the time this essay was written to that of his more well-known works from the later 1930s (e.g. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and the unfinished “Arcades Project”) or, rather, that this essay is an idiosyncratic work in his overall oeuvre, perhaps reflecting an homage of sorts to his friend Brecht (who was much more consistently orthodox Marxist than Benjamin), is an interesting question to consider— although not, obviously, one that can be answered here.

There are, however, undoubted continuities with his later work (especially the aforementioned “Work of Art” essay) in his arguments for the transformational status of the newspaper. In strikingly McLuanesque manner (or, given Benjamin’s antecedent status, perhaps rather McLuhan’s later “Benjaminian” ideas), Benjamin (curiously quoting himself without attribution) points to the effect of the newspaper’s disjointed, never-finished quality, i.e. its medium, on its readers. “[T]he fact that nothing binds the reader to his paper as much as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day, has been used by editors, who are always starting new columns open to his questions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes hand in hand with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who see themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers” (Benjamin 1934, 3). And this breaking down of the barrier between author and public, producer and audience is, Benjamin argues, a revolutionary action in its breaking of social hierarchies that place the laboring classes beneath the literary, artistic, bourgeois class.

            

 What is obvious, however, is how much Benjamin here differs from Adorno’s views on the relation between artistic production and politics. For both, there is an intimate connection between artistic quality and “correct” politics; but whereas the former argues that the autonomy of the artist should ultimately give way to “plac[ing] himself on the side of the proletariat” (1), the latter insists that the only way to safeguard the possibility of a truthful, non-compromised artistic practice is precisely through the work’s insistence on its autonomy, as that which resists commodification and is thus best able to “crack…established patterns of self-evidence” (Goehr 2004, 235). Nowhere are their differences more obvious than in Benjamin’s discussion of Eisler’s comments on the relation of absolute (non-lyric) music with capitalism: “Words alone can…bring about the transformation of the concert into a political meeting” (Benjamin 1934, 5). There could, in fact, be few things more abhorrent to Adorno than insisting on the necessity of words for music or the subsuming of the autonomy of music (or art more generally) to the inherent heteronomy of a political gathering. Only through its absolute otherness from such prosaic demands can art, according to Adorno, be of any positive political value.

            

 Despite Benjamin’s more obviously orthodox Marxist position in this essay, however, there is a way in which one can see Adorno as, in fact, more true to Marx—at least the older, more structuralist Marx of Das Kapital. This is in terms of their respective views on voluntarism. Benjamin, following Brecht, writes that intellectuals should not “simply transmit the apparatus of production without simultaneously changing it to the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism” (4). Adorno, on the other hand, does not see genuine, truthful artists as able to will their art in the direction of socialism or of any other; artists, rather, follow the immanent logic of the artistic medium wherever it takes them. In the case of music, Schoenberg did not simply decide to begin writing atonal music around 1908; instead, he realized the next step from what the musical materials post-Wagner and Brahms had bequeathed him. This wasn’t in the direction of socialism, capitalism or any other “ism,” but rather in the direction of art. Although the voluntarism of Benjamin’s position is far more common among Marxists both then and now, such stress on the value of individual volition is in strong tension, if not outright contradicts, the older Marx’s own insistence on the necessarily structural determinations of individuals.

            

 From my understanding of Benjamin’s later texts, he did move closer to Adorno’s position through the 1930s without ever sharing Adorno’s pessimism as to the potential value of mechanical and electrical technologies in liberating the proletariat. The opposition between these two sides of leftist aesthetics—elitist autonomy vs. mass heteronomy—is still alive and well, although because of Benjamin’s tragic early death it was the elitist-autonomy of Adorno that would come to dominate the Frankfurt School’s own variety of unorthodox Marxism.

           

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. 1934. The author as producer. New Left Review 1 (62):

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=135 (accessed February 14, 2011).

Goehr, Lydia. 2004. Dissonant works and the listening public. In The Cambridge

companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn, 257-85. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hafstein, Vladimar T. 2007. Spectacular reproduction: Ron’s angels and mechanical

reproduction in the age of ART (assisted reproductive technology). The Journal of Medical Humanities 28 (1): 3-17.

Richter. Gerhard. 2002. Benjamin's ghosts: interventions in contemporary literary and

cultural theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.