(Doi 10.1007/978-3-319-52304-0 - 5) Ross, Nathan - The Philosophy and Politics of Aesthetic Experience - Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of Critical Experience - From The Romantic PDF

CHAPTER 5
Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of Critical

Experience: From the Romantic Artwork
to the Disillusioning of Mimesis
Critical is something that one cannot be enough. (Friedrich Schlegel,

Fragment 281 in Kritische Fredrich Schlegel Ausgabe (KFSA), Vol. 2
(Paderborn: Schöning, 1958), 13. My translation.)
Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments
Walter Benjamin’s writings have a unique power to inspire new ways of

thinking about the relationship between art and politics. As Adorno wrote
in his ‘Portrait of Water Benjamin’: “Everything that fell under the scru-
tiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive”.1
After a brief attempt to become a professional philosopher in the early
1920s, he abandoned academic philosophy in order to devote himself to
the task of becoming “the foremost critic of German literature”,2 while
also writing insightfully on capitalism, modernity, and, eventually, the rise
of fascism in Germany. His various writings are remarkable as much for
their deep immersion in a variety of different experiences, as they are for
their relative cohesion in employing an evolving set of philosophical con-
cepts to interpret these experiences. He captured this paradoxical blend of
conceptualization and openness to experience in calling his own oeuvre
“a contradictory and mobile whole”.3 While we cannot pin him to a fixed
system, fixed definitions of terms, or fixed political opinions, nor can we
resist the urge to find a common project in his writings.
© The Author(s) 2017 131

N. Ross, The Philosophy and Politics of Aesthetic Experience, Political
Philosophy and Public Purpose, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52304-0_5
132 N. ROSS
There is arguably no concept or problem that stands more at the

center of Benjamin’s wide-ranging explorations than the concept of
experience (Erfahrung). According to Benjamin’s biographers, “[t]hree
concerns are always present in Benjamin’s work—and each has its ground
in the problematic of traditional philosophy. From first to last, he was
concerned with the problem of experience, with historical remembrance,
and with art as the privileged medium of both”.4 Following this formula-
tion, we could say that for Benjamin, the aesthetic is not so much a spe-
cialized subspecies of experience but the key to recovering experience in
its entirety from its reduction to the raw material of cognition. Benjamin
treats the notion of experience not so much as a fixed concept that has
to be defined but a field of possibility that has to be recovered from
oblivion. In modern philosophy, experience has often meant the material
taken up by cognition. In his earliest writings, he advocates for the need
to rescue the concept of experience from this cognitive context by inves-
tigating the experience of the mentally ill, children, and artists.5 In one
of his most poignant passages critiquing the culture of the post–World
War I era, he concludes that the very capacity to have an experience is
lost and contradicted by the context of political tyranny, capitalist crisis,
and rapid technological change in the early twentieth century.6 In his
later writings on film and new artistic media, he defends these new arts
by pointing to the way in which they eliminate an older form of experi-
ence while calling for a new one. And in many of his smaller, episodic
writings, the very concept of experience seems to be at stake in the way
that Benjamin tests the power of the subject to enter something new and
distinctive to gain a transformative insight about itself.
Given the ‘infinitely mobile’ quality of Benjamin’s writings on art,
literature, and philosophy, his continuous shift in objects and models
of interpretation, it would be a daunting task to distil something like a
theory of aesthetic experience out of Benjamin’s writings. It would be
impossible and perhaps reductive to specify a method or a firm set of
philosophical commitments that guide his practice as a critic, not just
because of the shifts in his thinking but also because of the primacy that
he grants to the object. Yet it would be equally reductive to consider
him as merely a critic who did not develop a set of innovative theoreti-
cal reflections that build on one another. Indeed, it is in the very nature
of experience, properly understood, that one opens oneself to the new,
while allowing it to reflect on one’s prior orientation in such a way as to
reveal both contradiction and continuity. His influence on philosophy
WALTER BENJAMIN’S PHILOSOPHY OF CRITICAL EXPERIENCE... 133
has been great, especially through his ‘only disciple’, Theodor Adorno,7
and his founding role in the early Frankfurt school of critical theory.
Indeed, I will argue that it is precisely in order to disentangle the com-
plex relationship between Benjamin and Adorno more that we need
to spell out certain coherent themes and philosophical theses that are
unique to Benjamin’s thinking.
Benjamin’s reflections on the nature of critical experience would not
be the same if they had not departed from a deep immersion in the
works of early Jena Romanticism. As a doctoral student in philosophy at
the University of Berne in 1920, Benjamin authored a dissertation that
remains a seminal work in the interpretation of German Romanticism,
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism. The work does
much to interpret the philosophies of Schlegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin as
offering a distinctive epistemology and ontology of art, one that repre-
sents a break with the Enlightenment theory of taste and judgment and
characterized instead by immanence to its subject matter and the politics
of sobriety. Although there are some scholarly limitations to the work,8
it paints a general picture of the Romantic movement that anticipates in
some key aspects that of recent scholarship. However, the goal of this
chapter is not to scrutinize Benjamin’s interpretation of the Romantics as
a work of secondary literature but to show how Benjamin’s entire philoso-
phy of critical experience departs from the problems and insights of this
study of the Romantics.
Benjamin’s late masterpiece on aesthetics, ‘The Artwork in the Age of
its Technological Reproducibility’, culminates in a claim about what it
means to have a critical experience and why such an experience matters
in a political sense. He expresses this claim in the form of a dialectically
charged alternative: art can either construct an illusion of social real-
ity that distances us from our role in constituting it, or it can create
a medium of activity in which we discover our vital freedom in con-
structing the social relation to the natural.9 In making this distinction,
he offers the subject of contemporary aesthetic experience the political
choice between a mode of experience in which the subject enjoys the
violence that constrains it, or a mode of experience in which it antici-
pates a liberating interplay with nature, a choice, in his terms, between
fascism and socialism. In order to conceptualize this dialectical alterna-
tive at the heart of modern society, he uses the two concepts derived
from the post-Kantian tradition: Schein and Spiel, semblance and play.
He advocates that the critically inclined subject must break through the
134 N. ROSS
experience of art as ‘semblance’ in order to liberate its potential as play.

The mimetic quality of art has to be stripped of its power to create illu-
sions in order to serve as a medium of critical reflection. While this dia-
lectical distinction might seem remarkably abstract and overloaded, he
illustrates it with a series of concrete examples that are rich both in their
phenomenological specificity and their political import.
Benjamin arrives at this dialectical imperative to strip art of its quality
as semblance over a series of works and influences: his writings on film
and photography; surrealism; his reckoning with Goethe; his debates
with Bertolt Brecht; his effort to conceptualize the purpose of literary
translation. But as I will argue, his thesis on the politically progressive
form of aesthetic experience depends most of all on his reading of the
Jena Romantics and his application of an insight that he gleaned from
them to the technological medium of art. This chapter will seek to
chart the series of mutually dependent insights that lead Benjamin to
formulate his thesis on the politics of aesthetics in such starkly dialecti-
cal terms. (1) In his reading of the German Romantics, he develops
the insight that art criticism involves unfolding an immanent, infinite
reflection that is embodied in the structure of the work and that the
critical engagement with art in this manner instills a ‘sobriety’ that
makes up the truth content of aesthetic experience. (2) In his work on
language and the theory of translation, he conceptualizes mimesis in
such a way as to reverse the Platonic ban on mimesis and reveal a dis-
tinctive kind of aesthetic truth content that emerges from the engage-
ment with the work on its own terms. (3) In even his earliest work
as a critic of capitalism, he demonstrates how the capitalist structure
of social relationships leads to a withering of the capacity to produce
truth in this mimetic manner and thus to a loss of the possibility for
experience in the modern subject. (4) Finally, as Benjamin confronts
the fundamental transformation of aesthetic experience in the age of
film and technical reproduction, he argues that we can salvage the pos-
sibility for critical experience by untangling two intertwined modes of
mimesis in these new arts: the capacity of art to create illusion and the
capacity to enable an interplay with nature. Counter to readings that
focus on the political and philosophical discontinuities between early
and late Benjamin, I argue that his late work develops a philosophy of
aesthetic experience that brings together the strands of his earlier think-
ing: his critique of capitalism, his conception of immanent critique, and
his philosophy of mimesis.
1 Critique as Redemptive Knowledge in Early

Romantic Theory
Even though Benjamin’s dissertation On the Concept of Art Criticism in
German Romanticism reads as a work of secondary literature, it also serves
to define many of the central features of his own later, groundbreaking
work as a critic. The Romantics redefine criticism so that it is not so much
something that we do to art, the judgment of the work according to the
pleasure of the subject, but rather something that art does to itself with
our participation, the ‘self-judgment of the work’. (We might call this a
reverse Copernican revolution in the history of aesthetic thought.) This
distinction represents a crucial discovery for Benjamin because it marks
criticism as a form of knowledge that redeems its subject from a merely
instrumental mode of assimilating objects to its own demands.
He notes that his study represents not a contribution to the history of
philosophy as to the ‘history of problems’10: it is concerned more with
revealing the Romantic contributions to defining criticism as a mode of
knowledge, than with defining Romanticism as a moment in the develop-
ment of the history of philosophy. Benjamin develops out of the philoso-
phies of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Hölderlin11 an ontology
of art and an epistemology of art criticism that would continue to guide his
practice.12 I believe it is most fruitful to consider this essay not merely as a
somewhat outdated attempt at historical scholarship, nor merely in terms
of Benjamin’s own pre-existing ‘affinity’ for the Romantics, but rather
in terms of what he learns from his encounter with the Romantics for
developing his own critical practice.13 In particular, Benjamin’s reading
emphasizes the Romantic rejection of the ‘economic’ model of criticism
(the critic as an arbiter of taste) in order to show how criticism offers an
immanent knowledge of art as a medium of reflection. The main pur-
pose of criticism, in the Romantics as well as Benjamin, is to redeem
cultural products from their status as commodities through a process of
immanent reflection.14 The Romantics of Benjamin’s study anticipate
the ‘retreat of the beautiful’15 as a fateful phenomenon of modern art,
developing a critical practice focused not on the selection of objects of
enjoyment but on the cultivation of subjectivity through reflection on the
work. Benjamin’s most important contribution to the scholarship of early
German Romanticism is beyond doubt his discovery of the principle of
sobriety as the ideal disposition and the cognitive ideal of their philosophy
of art. While this discovery is based on a cogent reading of this theme in
136 N. ROSS
the works of Schlegel and Hölderlin, which distinguishes them from the
theory of genius in Kant, as well as from the older theory of poetic inspi-
ration in Plato, it ends up articulating a critical posture toward art that
would infuse Benjamin’s later works. Sobriety, we will see, represents the
great discovery of the Romantic theory of art, because it is not merely a
mood, or an absence of intoxication, but a revolutionary way of integrat-
ing theory and experience.
Benjamin formulates what is distinctive in Schlegel’s method of critique
as follows:
With this the basic principle of Romantic object-knowledge is given: that

everything that is in the absolute, everything real, thinks … The germ cell
of all knowledge is thus a process of reflection in a thinking being through
which it gains knowledge of itself … Where there is no self-knowledge,
there is no knowledge.16
In the Romantic theory of knowledge, an object is only known insofar

as it is understood as knowing itself, possessing its own awareness. Such
knowledge considers nature not as an object but as a subject, as a set
of relations that embody subjective understanding in their own relation-
ality. (This theory of knowledge must have great affinity for the young
Benjamin as it bears a strong relation to his own conception of nature as a
series of mimetic relations, or as a creation that contains its own linguistic
content.) To engage in an experiment on nature is to bring nature into
a context where its own self-understanding communicates itself to the
awareness of the observer. This knowledge takes place in what Benjamin
terms a ‘medium of reflection’, because rather than an active-passive rela-
tionship between subject (knower) and object (known), there is a medial
relationship, in which the awareness of the observer becomes involved in
the awareness of nature.
As mystical as this notion of natural cognition might seem, it forms
the basis for an ontology that breaks down the subject-object dichotomy
and explains how knowledge can be both true to its content matter and
in an infinite state of becoming. Benjamin seems most concerned with
showing how this ontology allows the Romantics to gain a particularly
fruitful understanding of how we cognize art: “Art is a determination
of the medium of reflection—probably the most fruitful one that it has
received. Criticism of art is knowledge of the object in this medium of
reflection”.17 Even if we question the view that all natural objects, and
nature as a system of relations, have their own self-awareness, it should

be more clear that every product of culture is both an object (something
given to awareness with fixed properties) and a subject (a creation of
human thought and awareness, in which thought and awareness play a
constitutive role). Thus the Romantics consider the act of criticism as a
way of activating the reflection proper to the work of art, bringing out
not the way that the artist understands the work but the way that the
work reflects or embodies awareness in its objective structure. They con-
sider criticism not so much as an act of judgment, in which the subject
classifies the work and submits it to the standards of taste, but more as
an experiment upon the work. “Criticism is, as it were, an experiment
on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awak-
ened”.18 To write critically is to write in a way that enters into the work,
that communicates an experience of the structure and thought content
of the work.
Benjamin notes that the real radicality of this notion of criticism con-
sists in the way that it suspends the moment of judgment: judgment is
the power of the subject to apply values or standards to the work, such as
the notions of beauty, taste, or perfection.19 In viewing art as a medium
of reflection the Romantics no longer relate the work to a general stan-
dard of judgment but see it as advancing its own self-concept, which the
critic serves to elucidate. “Insofar as it judges the artwork, this occurs
in the latter’s self-judgment … In it, a necessary moment in all judg-
ment, the negative, is completely curtailed”.20 Benjamin summarizes the
crucial social result in this notion of criticism as “the complete positiv-
ity of criticism, in which the Romantic concept of criticism is radically
distinguished from the modern concept, which sees criticism as a court
of judgment”.21 This distinction between the Romantic model of criti-
cism and the modern concept enables the Romantics to see the function
of aesthetic culture in the most expansive terms, not merely as a matter
of pleasure or the refinement of one’s taste but as serving to educate
and develop subjectivity. Benjamin describes a crucial epochal shift in the
basic goal of aesthetic theory:
The concept of beauty has to retreat from the Romantic conception of art
altogether, not only because, in the rationalist conception, this concept is
implicated with that of rules, but above all because as an object of delight,
of pleasure, of taste, beauty seemed incompatible with the austere sobriety
that, according to the new conception, defines the essence of art.22
138 N. ROSS
While there is a Romantic side even to Kant’s aesthetic theory, in that

he balances the analytic of the beautiful with that of the sublime, as two
very different modes of aesthetic appreciation, Schlegel’s Romantic theory
transforms the very way that we understand the nature and function of
aesthetic experience. The Romantics replace the goal of refined pleasure,
the cultivation of tasteful enjoyment by the task of immanent analysis,
with the engagement with the work on its terms and education of one’s
own self-awareness through engagement with the work. Indeed, it should
be clear that this ‘retreat of the beautiful’ has great import for the later
work of Benjamin, as well as for Adorno, and perhaps serves as the most
adequate way to understand what they both see at stake in the rise of mod-
ern art forms.23 In Benjamin’s later Artwork essay, the Romantic thesis
on the retreat of the beautiful develops into his influential thesis on the
decline of the ‘aura’ of artworks that call for isolated contemplation in
favor of those new disenchanted artistic forms that call forth a direct link
between enjoyment and awareness of the work’s method of production.24
In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, this thesis on the retreat of the beautiful
leads to the demand to consider the function of art as a matter of truth
content rather than the pleasure of the spectator.25 In an authentic aes-
thetic experience, it is not so much that we judge the artwork but that we
come to feel the artwork is judging us, that is, immersing us in a reflection
that transforms our self-conception.
Benjamin prepares the way for his own critical practice in the way
that he distinguishes the Romantic conception of art criticism from a
more prevalent, modern notion of criticism. With the rise of a cultural
marketplace in the modern era, in which consumers can choose between
a profusion of products too great to allow comprehensive experimental
knowledge, the critic is called on to play an economic role by distin-
guishing the good from the bad and thus allowing us only to spend
time and money on those that pass muster. The critic thus acts as arbiter
between the consumer and the marketplace filled with products meant
as means of enjoyment. This economic conception of the critic not only
matches the way most consumers see the purpose of the film or literature
critic but aligns with the dominant trend of modern aesthetic theory,
from Hume to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In these theories the pur-
pose of art is to produce a particular kind of pleasure and the purpose
of theory is to act as a tribunal in deciding what makes a work beauti-
ful, what makes a spectator tasteful, what makes an artist’s work worthy
of aesthetic experience, and more broadly, what role theory can play in
delimiting such a field of experience. Benjamin sees in the Romantics a

redemption of the notion of criticism and the task of the critic so that
criticism does not play the role of a theory of taste, does not allow us to
choose from a profusion of objects those which will please us, or does
not serve as a subjective guide to our own reaction to the works. They
redeem criticism for Benjamin by seeing it as a mode of knowledge that
allows us to enter into works of art, to activate their own subjectivity
rather than making them instruments of our own. At the same time,
by freeing criticism from its economic function, the Romantics make
criticism into a force for gaining knowledge of the self and society that
is redemptive. The ideal of immanent critique informs Benjamin’s enter-
prise, even in his later, overtly political phase, because its initial impulse
is informed by a resistance to the commodification of cultural products
in the theory of aesthetic judgment.
The notion of redemption plays a crucial role throughout Benjamin’s
work, from his early essay on language to his late ‘Theses on the Philosophy
of History’: the former aims at a redemption of language from its debase-
ment to a utilitarian context, in which words merely serve to express
human intentions, rather than to name the nature of things26; the latter
work seeks to redeem history by giving voice to the hopes and suffering
of those who are left behind by the historical movement of progress.27 In
both works, as different as they might be, a common notion of redemp-
tion emerges, unifying Benjamin’s language mysticism and his work as a
Marxist critic: to redeem something is to bring it out of its instrumen-
tal context, or to free it from its reified character as a means or a com-
modity. In this sense many things call for redemption: nature, words, the
labor process, historical events, and so on. Redemption is thus a form of
knowledge that considers things not as commodities or as information but
as subjectivities, as moments of consciousness. While this act of redemp-
tion is most properly a subject of ethical philosophy, as a philosophy that
concerns itself with the encounter between subjectivities in the practical
sphere, it also provides a method for approaching and criticizing culture.
Humans are cultural beings to the extent that they produce things that
communicate their relation to the world, from words to works of art.
These cultural products have an ambivalent status throughout Benjamin’s
philosophy, because they serve both as a medium of knowledge and as a
medium of reification.28 Criticism is the mode of knowledge proper to
these cultural products, and in his work on the Romantic notion of criti-
cism he seeks to distinguish that mode of criticism that does not reify
140 N. ROSS
works of art as products of human enjoyment but that knows them as

mediums of reflection.
It might seem that we lose a great deal that we expect from aesthetics if
the Romantics banish the negative moment in judgment: would it not lead
to an aesthetic critique in which there is no distinction, no discernment,
no scale of values, no way of rejecting inferior works? Does it not lead to
a pernicious kind of aesthetic relativism, in which all products demand the
same respect and attention? Benjamin demonstrates that the Romantic
response to this problem consists in their notion of the ‘uncriticizability of
bad works’. “If a work can be criticized, then it is a work of art: otherwise
it is not”.29 To put it another way, their notion of the medium of reflec-
tion does not apply to all things equally but is constituted by the objective
structure of the work. It is not that all works are equally good and none
are bad or inferior, but rather the act of judging the good and the bad in
relation to the feeling of the spectator is replaced by an engagement that
seeks out those works that deepen the self-awareness of the critic, while
passing over, or ironically writing in the margins of, those works that are
not reflective in their structure. Rather than judgment according to a stan-
dard of taste, or discernment in terms of the grade of pleasure, there is
an activity of reflection that ranges from the ironic to the infinitely sober.
Indeed, the act of criticism is more about discovering the limits in a
work than about a blind immersion in it: every work embodies its own
awareness within its structure, but in order to know this internal structure
of awareness, the work has to be taken beyond itself, submitted to an act
of criticism that dissolves it within the ‘medium of art’.30 It is obviously
fictional to think of any ‘thing’, whether a product of nature or of human
artifice, as capable of reflection on its own qua thing. In the Romantic
conception of reflection that Benjamin explicates, reflection always takes
place in a medium, in a relation of interaction between subject and object.
Every ‘thing’ in nature or art has a form that can only be known within a
continuity of forms. By dissolving the work within this continuity of forms
we see it as part of a process that takes place between subject and object.
The Romantic notion of criticism pays special attention to the notion
of form, and yet it completely alters the meaning of the notion of form
from its meaning in Enlightenment theories from Baumgarten to Kant.
Benjamin writes: “The Romantics, unlike the Enlightenment, did not
conceive of form as a rule for judging the beauty of art … Every form as
such counts as a peculiar modification of the medium of reflection … the
critic will hit upon their connectedness as moments within the medium
of reflection”.31 And: “Form is the objective expression of the reflec-

tion proper to the work, the reflection that constitutes its essence”.32 To
consider a form as pleasing or not pleasing involves placing the objective
form in relation to some teleology that is in the subject. Thus despite
his attention to aesthetic form, Kant’s aesthetics subjectivizes the distinc-
tively aesthetic element of art, because his interpretation of form makes it
aesthetically meaningful insofar as it touches off a ‘free play of the cogni-
tive faculties’ and thus robs aesthetic experience its status as a form of
knowledge.33 By contrast, the Romantics understand form as meaningful
in the way that it brings the subject into the process of art. Forms are to
be ranked, qualified, valued, and placed in dynamic relation to each other
to the degree that they allow the subject to discover patterns of reflection
in them. For Benjamin, this means that the Romantics tended to prefer
literature as epitome of art, because of how language can encapsulate and
reflect on other experiences, and to prefer prose as the sublation of poetry,
because of its sobriety and its ability to comment on and contain reflec-
tions in an unbounded way.34 He writes:
Art is the continuum of forms and the novel is the comprehensible mani-
festation of this continuum … The idea of poetry is prose …. Prose is the
creative ground of poetic forms, all of which are mediated in it and dissolved
as though in their canonical creative ground.35
One of Benjamin’s greatest and most original contributions to the inter-

pretation of early German Romanticism consists in his discovery of
sobriety as the cognitive ideal and essential mood of the arts.36 Just as
prose is the sublation of poetry in Romantic criticism, sobriety is the
frame of mind that penetrates and stands above the manic comportment
often equated with poetic creativity. Benjamin cites a series of passages
in Schlegel and Novalis and even draws connection to crucial reflections
of Hölderlin,37 in which they celebrate the value of sobriety as the pro-
saic frame of mind that does the most to promote aesthetic creativity. As
Benjamin notes, the Romantics hereby reverse a long tradition in philos-
ophy, going back at least to Plato, of associating the poetic frame of mind
with drunkenness, cognitive lack of clarity, and mania. Plato associates
the poet with the manic just as he denies the mimetic artist the cognitive
clarity to interpret the meaning of their most inspired creations. What is
at stake in this debate over mania and sobriety is not so much a moral
condemnation of intoxication or a kind of instrumental prescription for
142 N. ROSS
how best to write poetry but ultimately nothing less than the status of
the art as a form of knowledge. Insofar as we associate the creation of the
work with mania, and distinguish poetry from the prose that explains it,
criticism as a form of knowledge is always external to the work. Socrates
proclaims in Plato’s Apology that he found great poets least able to inter-
pret the meaning of their works because they wrote them in a state of
divine inspiration. Kant preserves this view of the relation between the
poet and the work in more prosaic terms with his theory of genius: cre-
ation of artistic beauty happens according to a quasi-natural process, by
which a lack of understanding is actually constitutive of the creation of
great art. To say that one is a genius is precisely to say that a lack of for-
mal knowledge is constitutive of the formal perfection of their work. This
conception of genius or divine inspiration serves to reinforce a division
of labor between philosophy and art. It is precisely this division of labor
in aesthetic and cognitive matters that Benjamin seeks to challenge in his
discovery of the sobriety of art within the Romantic theory. By dissolving
the work of poetry in a medium of reflection, seeing prose as the ground
of poetry and sobriety as the truth of inspiration, the Romantics allow the
critical comportment to arise out of the work, as part of what constitutes
its specifically aesthetic character, and they understand the experience of
the work as a process of immanent critique, and art as a medial form of
knowledge. As Benjamin points out, “Criticism is far less the judgment
of the work than its consummation”.38 In the Romantic theory criticism
even takes a kind of ontological and epistemic precedence over the works,
since the works themselves are only activated in their truth as parts of a
medium of reflection through the critical awareness that dissolves them
into this medium. In the poetry of the future, it seems that the Romantics
hope for a poetry that transitions into prose in order to reflect itself, as
well as a literary criticism that is itself a work of art.
The key to understanding the Romantic notion of sobriety might be
teased out of an important Hölderlin text:
There are degrees of enthusiasm. Beginning with merriness, which is prob-

ably the lowest, right up to the enthusiasm of the general, who in the midst
of battle mightily maintains his genius, there is an infinite ladder. To ascend
and descend this ladder, is the vocation and bliss of the poet.
That is the measure of enthusiasm that is given to every individual, that
the one still maintains his consciousness to the necessary degree in a greater,
the other only in a weaker fire. There where sobriety leaves is the limit of
your enthusiasm. The great poet is never removed from himself, he may
elevate his self as high as he wishes.39
We see that Hölderlin defines sobriety not as a lack of enthusiasm

(Begeisterung) but as the greatest degree of enthusiasm that the subject
can contain. He ‘measures’ sobriety precisely by the degree of enthusiasm
that it can bear, by the ability to ‘maintain consciousness to the neces-
sary degree’, to move up and down amidst various emotional states as if
on a ladder. He places poetry in a special relationship to this measure of
sobriety. This passage offers us insight not only into Hölderlin but also
into the way that Benjamin deploys the notion of sobriety40: it is not that
Romantics prescribe prose as a remedy to poetry, but they see it as the
more intensive mode of writing that is able to slip in and out of the intoxi-
cation with linguistic revelry in order to gain clarity. Prose is the truth of
poetry because it can contain and comment on poetry. This interpretation
seems supported by the ontology of the medium of reflection, in which
works are dissolved in order to find their inherent cognitive content.
This highly original and cogent discovery of the principle of sobriety
in Romantic theory tells us something about Benjamin’s own concep-
tion of art criticism. In his elevating of sobriety above genius, Benjamin
values the spirit that is not so taken in by the creative process that it fails
to reflect on all of the different ways in which the work could be under-
stood. In the Romantic conception, the artist is creative precisely to the
degree that she can move from creation to commentary, from poetry to
prose, in a seamless manner. In the most programmatically crucial work of
Benjamin’s later, political phase, ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility’ (1935), Benjamin activates this principle of the sobriety
of art as an antidote against the fascist tendencies of his age. He engages
in a critique of the ‘aura’ of art, as that aesthetic feature by which the
arts present the ‘nearness of distance’ in such a way as to captivate and
intoxicate the subject. His critique of aura is bound up not only with his
hope for a new, technological medium of aesthetic experience but also
with the Romantic insight into the ‘retreat of the beautiful’ in place of art
as a medium of reflection. In the epilogue of this later essay he makes the
distinction between two opposite possibilities confronting aesthetic expe-
rience in the age of fascism: society must choose between the politicization
of art (socialism) and the aesthetization of war (fascism).41 It is with this
gesture that the Romantic principle of sobriety becomes politically fruit-
ful in Benjamin’s aesthetic thought. He reads the relation of theory and
144 N. ROSS
aesthetic experience as not merely a matter of aesthetic theory, or of the

academic division of labor, but as a core choice of the political direction of
society. In a key section of the ‘Artwork’ essay, Benjamin makes precisely
this immanence between reflection and enjoyment (which is just what he
means by sobriety) into the distinguishing feature between progressive art
and art which serves as ideology.42 If the creation and critique of aesthetic
forms is not able to unify knowledge with the means of sensory enjoy-
ment, then he argues that the result will be a mode of enjoyment in which
subjects enjoy the means of violence and repression used to contain them.
In the Romantics, Benjamin finds articulated the epistemological justi-
fication for his immanent engagement with the works: rather than a theory
of judgment, they theorize art as a medium of reflection, in which vari-
ous works are distinguished not in their value but in the density of the
medium of reflection that they offer. As we will see in the next few sec-
tions, Benjamin manages to give this philosophy of immanent critique
of art as a medium of reflection a politically critical direction through his
incisive work on the concept of mimesis and its relation to capitalist forms
of rationality.
2 Mimesis and the Genesis of Critical Experience

in Benjamin’s Writings
The prior section posed the question: what does it mean to have a critical
experience? According to Benjamin’s reading of the Romantics, it means
developing the reflective core of an object of experience to the point
where it becomes a medium of reflection. As we trace the development
of this question of critical experience further into Benjamin’s later think-
ing, it becomes necessary to look at his emphasis on mimesis as a key way
of conceptualizing the relation of subjectivity to the artwork as well as to
social reality. Like the medium of reflection, the concept of mimesis repre-
sents the way in which the subject activates the reflective core of the work.
It would be safe to say that the term ‘mimesis’ almost becomes a synonym
in Benjamin’s works for an authentic and true experience: it describes the
proper mode of approaching the artwork (whether as a critic or transla-
tor), as well as the artwork’s relation to the society around it.
The concept of mimesis has a complex genesis in the works of Benjamin,
as it does not ever receive a systematic formulation but appears in many
places and interacts with a variety of different themes and concerns in
his work. He defines mimesis as the capacity to recognize and produce
‘non-sensible similarities’, a unique ability to enter into a relation with

nature, to reveal relations of participation and affinity between things and
subjects in a transitory way. His writings on language consider this faculty
for producing non-sensible similarities as even more vital to the true func-
tion of language than communication; his writings on history consider the
decline or modification in the meaning of mimesis in modern life as one of
the most meaningful forces contributing to the ‘loss of experience’, and in
his philosophy of art, he considers how different forms of mimesis play a
key role in distinguishing the political role and value of art.
It would be a challenging feat to provide a catalogue of all of the dif-
ferent meanings that Benjamin attributes to this term and of all of the
problems that he uses it to solve.43 In this section, however, I will trace a
key transformation in Benjamin’s philosophy of mimesis that we see most
clearly in his philosophy of language and translation, a transformation that
more or less coincides with his encounter with Romantic philosophy: to
consider translation as an artifice of truth.
There is a question that seems to have concerned Benjamin at several
different phases of his career and to which he comes up with quite differ-
ent answers: in translating a literary text from one language to the other,
what might we aim for, what might we hope for?44 Benjamin goes from a
conception of language and translation that causes him to see translation
as a doomed enterprise, one in which the truth can only be lost or partially
preserved, to a conception of translation not merely as the preserving or
revealing of truth but as the production of truth. What does it mean to
say that a translation can be, in a sense, more true than the text that it
translates? What does it imply about the nature of truth in the artwork? It
seems that Benjamin answers these questions by showing that the transla-
tion can produce truth not only by revealing latent aspects of the original
but even more by transfiguring the language into which the translation
occurs.
Benjamin’s early essay ‘On Language in General and the Language of
Man’ (1916) considers language as a fundamental feature of the mean-
ingfulness of nature: all things are imbued with meaning, and when we
name them and speak about them, we are translating their language into
our own. In this sense, Benjamin thinks of the very inner constitution of
language as a process of mimetically responding to the natural essence
of things. However, he argues that the multiplicity of human languages
reveals that our mimetic relation to nature is in a ‘fallen’ state: because
there are so many, not inherently related ways in which we name the same
146 N. ROSS
thing, we see that our language is a human artifice that disfigures the true
language of things. Benjamin argues here that the multiplicity of human
languages goes hand-in-hand with the fact that we no longer use lan-
guage to know things but only as an instrument to order them for our
own purposes. The multiplicity of languages is thus a ‘tower of babel’, an
indication of a ‘fallen state’ in which human instrumental concerns have
supplanted reverence for the nature of things, and this fallen state means
that translation from one human language to another is merely the act of
moving from one code for communication to another. The early language
essay thus has a highly ambiguous view on translation as mimesis: on the
one hand, it holds mimesis to the lofty standard of unlocking the true
nature of things, but in a second gesture, it excludes ‘fallen’ human lan-
guage from the potential to do so.45
By the time he writes his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1921),
what is a curse in the language essay, namely the multiplicity of languages
and the need for continuous translation from one medium to another,
becomes the greatest richness of language.46 His central argument in this
piece is that a literary translation does not necessarily diminish or sap the
poetic content of the original, nor does it merely succeed if it conveys the
same information as the original. Rather, he argues that translation actu-
ally has the potential to add to the poetic truth of the original by providing
a series of reflections of the original in different mediums. The multiplicity
of human languages represents an infinite resource, rather than a curse,
because it allows us to reflect our thoughts and experiences in a variety of
different densities. Languages possess their own respective lives, in which
they grow in expressive resources through the encounter with other lan-
guages. By means of translation, the work authored in one language gains
a second life, which transcends the life of the original language and gives
new living possibilities to another language. He writes of this symbiotic
relation between languages: “If however these languages continue to grow
in this way until the messianic end of their history, it is translation that
catches fire from the eternal life of the works and the perpetually renewed
life of language”.47 In comparing this passage to the earlier language essay,
the emphasis is no longer on the linguistic original sin, in which language
loses its magical relation to the truth of things, but instead on the ‘mes-
sianic end of time’, the possibility that language, through constant growth
in different forms, gain a redemptive relation to truth.
There are two distinctive ways in which Benjamin argues that a transla-
tion can expand on the truth value of language: a German translation of a
Greek work might draw from resources in the German language that are
not in the Greek and thus say what the original said in a more explanative
way. But even more fruitful for Benjamin is the possibility that the German
language might discover new, hitherto unknown resources in its encounter
with the resources of the Greek language. In stretching the conventional
bounds of the translator’s language, the work gains a new life in a new
‘medium of density’. “It is the task of the translator to release in his own
language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liber-
ate the language imprisoned in the work in his recreation of that work”.48
The model for such a translation, in Benjamin’s view, is Hölderlin’s radical
transformation of the German language in his translations of Pindar and
Sophocles, translations that were rejected at the time but left their mark
on Hölderlin’s own poetic language.
For Benjamin, the theory of translation raises fundamental questions
about the nature of language and the nature of truth. If the goal of lan-
guage were merely to communicate some amount of information, or
express some emotional content, then translation would be merely a mat-
ter of recreating and could be measured by the standard of correctness.
And yet Benjamin holds translation to a higher standard here: to open
up the act of writing and thinking to a layer of language that does not
communicate information or express a certain content. He writes: “In all
language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can
be conveyed, something that cannot be communicated; … it is some-
thing that symbolizes or that is symbolized … . In this pure language
… as expressionless and creative Word … all information, all sense, and
all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be
extinguished”.49 Just as in the early essay ‘On Language’, Benjamin holds
open the possibility for language to penetrate into a true experience of
things precisely to the extent that it raises itself above the aspect of com-
munication. In such a context, the ‘truth’ resides not in the fidelity to the
original language of things but in the way that act of translation expands
the reflective capacity of language as such.50
In his essay ‘On the Mimetic Capacity’, Benjamin once again raises
the problem of multiple languages in a way that allows us to under-
stand better how the act of translation could produce such truth: “If one
orders the words of different languages that mean the same thing around
what is meant, as if around their middle-point, then it would have to be
investigated how they all, which often don’t have the slightest thing in
common with each other, are similar in their core to the thing that is
148 N. ROSS
meant”.51 Here we see Benjamin using the notion of non-sensible simi-

larity to recapture the magic of language that makes translation possi-
ble. At the core of language is the capacity to produce and reproduce
‘non-sensible similarities’, a capacity that he sees as the basis of mimetic
behavior. He gives many examples of how humans have developed such
non-sensible similarities: a child playing at being a wind-mill, early humans
seeing figures and forms in the relations of starts. Such relations are ‘non-
sensible’ because they rest on establishing through movement, through
synthesis, a connection that is not already given. And Benjamin notes that
there is a temporality to the production of such non-sensible similarities:
there is a fleeting moment in which it becomes possible to give expres-
sion to a relationship through a creative act that would remain invisible at
other moments. Finally, he argues that as much as this mimetic capacity
has withered in modern life, our languages remain living storehouses of
such acts of producing non-sensible similarities: “Accordingly, language
would be the highest application of the mimetic capacity: a medium that
has absorbed without remainder the earlier distinctive capacities for simi-
larities in such a way that it now represents the medium in which things
encounter each other, no longer in the spirit of the seer or the priest, but
rather in their essences, fleeting and ephemeral substances, indeed aromas
that encounter each other and step into relationship with one another”.52
Here he gives expression to the notion of ‘pure language’ at the heart of
the translation essay: language is an archive of acts by which we reach out
to things and give expression to relationships that exist for us between
them. It does not merely communicate but produces fleeting relations of
affinity between things, and between things and subjects. This endows
translation with the capacity to produce truth. In the case of translation,
such production leads to a web of connections between various languages,
in which the being of the original is reflected in a potentially infinite vari-
ety of ways.53
Benjamin’s central insight here is that the translatability of language is
not something foreign to it but in fact an expression of its inherent life and
truth, just as the Romantics demonstrate to Benjamin that criticism is not
an act performed on the work but an expansion of the subjectivity inher-
ent to the work’s internal constitution as art. It would perhaps not be too
much to claim that Benjamin’s encounter with the Romantics enabled him
to come to this reappraisal of translation and to the view of mimesis as an
immanent production of truth.54 In a backward glance to his work on the
Romantics, Benjamin credits them with the insight into the life process
of language within literature that separates his conception of ‘The Task

of the Translator’ from his earlier theological account of language: “They
(the Romantics) more than any others were gifted with an insight into the
life of literary works—an insight for which translation provides the high-
est testimony. To be sure, they hardly recognized translation in this sense,
but devoted their entire attention to criticism—another if lesser factor
in the continued life of works”.55 What is it exactly that Benjamin attri-
butes here to the Romantics? Although they do not develop an explicit
account of translation like the one he is working on, they view the rela-
tion between art and criticism in an analogous way. As we saw in the prior
section, the Romantics do not see criticism as a subjective act of judging
that stands outside of the work but as a culmination of the inner essence
of art. Because the work is a medium of reflection, a kernel of subjective
activity, the process of engaging with it as a critic or translator is a process
of unfolding its truth content. Indeed, I would argue that for Benjamin,
it is precisely this insight that he developed out of the Romantics in his
dissertation that allows him to think of translation as a form of truth pro-
duction. The tower of Babel from Benjamin’s early essay is replaced by
something more akin to Schlegel’s ‘progressive universal poetry’.
This key insight from the translation essay suggests an important ele-
ment in how we have to think of mimesis as true: it is not so much that
truth is measured by the way in which the translation adds something
to the original or provides a copy of it, rather it is the way in which a
language, and by extension a culture, grows through its attempt to give
expression to the original. Truth is understood not in terms of correctness,
or correspondence, but in terms of the on-going expansion within the
capacity for experience, a development of self-awareness within the very
medium of expression.
2.1
Critique as Mortification of the Works
It must also be specified that Benjamin’s relation to the Romantic theory
of criticism does not survive in his works without a certain ‘determinate
negation’: by this I mean not a mere rejection of the Romantic thesis, as he
understood it, but a conscious transformation of it. While he understood
the Romantic conception of critique as one that gives life to the object,
makes the object appear as a subject, Benjamin increasingly understood
critique in a somewhat inverse sense as ‘mortification’ of the work. He
formulates this point perhaps most clearly in a letter: “My definition is:
150 N. ROSS
criticism is the mortification of the works. Not the intensification of con-

sciousness in them (that is Romantic!), but their colonization by knowl-
edge”.56 What does Benjamin mean by the task of mortifying the work?
And what implications does this have for thinking about the nature of a
truly critical experience?
Benjamin introduces this idea of critique as mortification in the context
of his study of a ‘dead’ aesthetic form: German Baroque tragic drama
(Trauerspiel). His study dwells on the fact that the form of the Baroque
dramas is dead to us in a way that, for example, the dramas of Goethe are
not, which is to say, they do not correspond to any widespread form in
which we experience modern dramatic works. But it is precisely this rela-
tively dead quality that they have that makes them criticizable. As Samuel
Weber argues in Benjamin’s-abilities, it is precisely the sense in which lan-
guage and literature are constantly in the process of dying that makes
them ‘criticizable’ or ‘translatable’.57 The work that speaks to us in a lan-
guage that is ‘alive’ does not ask to be translated. And yet as Weber points
out, it is precisely the translatability of the work that makes it a condition
for the possibility of that mode of experience that translates and thereby
expands the inner potential of language.
Benjamin’s study of the Baroque mourning drama (Trauerspiel) rests
on the crucial distinction between the symbolic function of classical art and
the allegorical function embodied in the Baroque. Unlike the Baroque,
the classical work is beyond criticism precisely to the extent that its mean-
ing is symbolic: it presents us with an organic unity between its sensible
formation and its meaning. Goethe prided himself on the way in which
criticism could add nothing to his works but only take something away by
dividing and dissecting the organic whole. The allegorical, on the other
hand, presents us with experiences of a nature that are not organic in this
manner but caught in the throes of death. In doing so, it gives pause for
a kind of reflection that could be called the starting point of criticism. To
the Baroque allegorist, “History does not assume the form of the process
of an eternal life so much as that of an irresistible decay. Allegory thereby
declares itself to be beyond beauty”.58 Reading the work as allegory rather
than symbol means taking a different, more critical stance on the way in
which the past remains relevant to the present. In this practice of con-
structing sensible nature as a series of arbitrary signs, referring to the mor-
tality of natural life and the pessimistic trajectory of history, the Baroque
deepens Benjamin’s philosophy of criticism even beyond the Romantic
conception. While the philosophy of Romanticism looked for what is frag-
mentary in the work so as to enable a process of endless reflection on

the meaning of the work, the Baroque allegory ‘mortifies’ the object of
experience in a way that engenders philosophical reflection. As Benjamin
writes about the link between Baroque allegory and the inception of criti-
cal awareness:
The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic

form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of
every important work of art, into a philosophical truth. This transformation
of material content into truth content makes the decrease in effectiveness
whereby the attraction of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade into
the basis for a rebirth, in which all ephemeral beauty is stripped off and the
work stands as a ruin.59
Criticism does not treat the work as dead in the sense of being finished
with it, rather it treats its relative historical content as an occasion for
philosophical reflection. Criticism does not impose a philosophical mean-
ing on the work but rather treats the work as an occasion for making his-
torical content into a philosophical reflection. In the mode of experience
that Benjamin here calls criticism, the artwork allows philosophy to ask its
‘timeless questions’ in a way that is embedded in historical content. This
is precisely what Benjamin means by the truth content of art: this inter-
penetration of historical content and philosophical ideas in a manner that
is not imposed from above but arises immanently out of an experience of
the work.
In this specific formulation of the nature of criticism, we see why the
artwork is crucial, that is, why it cannot simply be a matter of culture
criticism or critical theory tout court: the artwork is the mobile middle
term between historical content and philosophical questions. The artwork
expresses historical content in a manner that is inherently fragmentary,
and it thus gives philosophical questions a field of reflection that is inces-
sant. Benjamin comes back to this relation between art and philosophy in
a fragment: “The work of art does not compete with philosophy itself—it
merely enters into the most precise relation with philosophy though its
affinity with the ideal of the problem”.60 The relation between the artwork
and philosophy is thus not teleological, as if the artwork provided the key
to solving philosophical problems. Rather, they enter into an “affinity”
with each other because of the ways in which their problematic natures
feed into each other. The artwork does not provide a symbol of the abso-
152 N. ROSS
lute, as in one understanding of Romanticism, but instead provides frag-

ments that make it possible for the critic to experience philosophical ideals
as problems that inhere in history.
His notion of ‘mortification’ resembles the central movement of his
translation essay: the translator does not achieve a truly literary effect
by making a ‘dead’ work speak in a living language, as the cliché might
have it, but rather by infecting the living, familiar language with what is
uncanny and unfamiliar in the language from which the work is translated.
This insight has to be applied more fundamentally as an understanding of
what it means to be critical: to be critical is not to make the work relevant,
to translate a work of literature into a context that would make it easy to
absorb into our current set of concerns. Rather, to be critical is to allow
our current set of concerns to be invaded by some possibility of expres-
sion that has been killed off by the course of history. The critic ‘mortifies’
the work by attending to what is dead in it but as a lost possibility that
illuminates the present.
Benjamin’s re-articulation of criticism as mortification might seem
at first to represent a break with the Romantic concept of critique.
Yet it is noteworthy that he formulates it so explicitly as a reversal of
his earlier conception of the Romantic medium of reflection precisely
because it deepens the set of negations and commitments that he had
articulated in his work on Romanticism. He had been interested in the
way in which the Romantic theory represents a break with the mod-
ern conception of the critic as someone who assigns an instrumental
value to the object. The Romantics make art into something that has
its own, internal awareness precisely because they want consciousness
to be transformed by the work’s nascent subjectivity, rather than let-
ting the work be subsumed to the needs of the marketplace. Benjamin’s
conception of mortification involves a deepening of this very move away
from the instrumental value of the work. The Romantic conception
of critique makes the ‘mere’ object into a subject-object that has its
own voice; Benjamin’s conception of critique as mortification makes the
object dead, not in the sense of making it back into a mere object but
by insisting that what is true within it has not been allowed to survive.
It is thus just as he is turning toward the Baroque notion of allegory
that he discovers a deeper meaning in the Romantic philosophy of the
fragment, as discussed in the prior chapter on Schlegel.61 Rather than
looking at the artwork as a series of symbols that reflect our present, he
proposes in his Trauerspiel book to regard the work’s truth content as a
series of broken pieces that reveal the constitutive role of suffering, loss,
and forgetting in human history.
With this conception of mortification, Benjamin gains a clearer under-
standing of how art critique performs a socially critical task. Critique does
not simply concentrate on works that are dead, but it mourns the way in
which these works express something that has been lost within the process
of historical progress. It is not nostalgic in its concern for the past but
rather infects the present with an awareness of its complicity in a context
of repression, suffering, and forgetting. Benjamin’s conception of critique
as ‘mortification’ makes the artwork dead so that we can experience it as
a point of resistance to what he calls ‘the loss of experience’ in modern
culture.
2.2
Mimesis and the Loss of Experience
Just as Benjamin develops his conception of critique as the mortification of
works of art, he also develops a critique of his own time as one that has lost
the capacity for experience. As much importance as Benjamin attributed
to mimesis as a means of establishing affinity between self and nature, and
as a mode of knowledge and truth, he also acknowledges that this basic
capacity has “become fragile” and is endangered within modern culture.62
He notes that either mimesis will not survive at all in modern forms of
conduct or else it will have to take on a new form.63 This account of the
withering of mimesis finds its best formulation in a famous text on the
decline of storytelling after World War I. He argues in a moving passage
that there are no storytellers of modern life because our form of life pre-
cludes the very possibility of experience (Erfahrung).
It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our

possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One
reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value …
For never has experience been more thoroughly contradicted than strate-
gic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily
experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.64
This passage is remarkable for the way that it truncates an entire critique
of the era of the Weimar Republic into a few sentences and juxtaposes
this timely critique into a philosophical problem: the loss of experience.
Benjamin perceives the way in which the combined context of late capital-
154 N. ROSS
ism in crisis, failed democracy, and technological warfare do not allow us

to leave intact the very basic core philosophical question of what it means
to have an experience.
This problem of the loss of experience means that we cannot simply
approach the problem of critique in terms of the approach of the subject
to the content of experience, because it indicates that there is something
blocking experience from the outside. That is, he argues in this passage that
there is a force in the development of technology, politics, economics, and
culture that seems to block the capacity for experience. Critique will not
be possible if it does not name and provide knowledge of this force that
blocks experience. If there is one single name for this force that blocks
experience, according to Benjamin, it is capitalism.
3 Benjamin’s Critique of Capitalism

Any account of Benjamin’s philosophical project has to take account not
only of the increasing adoption of Marxist terms in his thought but even
more of the originality of his critique of capitalism. In his dissertation
on German Romanticism, Benjamin argues that to be critical means to
engage with an object as a medium of reflection, to find the act of thought
realized in a structure at which it does not come to a halt, and to partici-
pate in the unfolding of the subjective kernel of things. This conception of
criticism is inherently positive in its relation to art, because it activates the
reflective quality inherent in the work, yet it also provides Benjamin with
a method for approaching society with a kind of negative critical knowl-
edge. To define art as a medium of reflection means placing it in a critical
relation to those features of reality that actively resist reflection.
If the Romantic theory of criticism involves an injunction for the sub-
ject not to instrumentalize the object, not to make it into a mere com-
modity in relation to others, but to expand its own subjectivity through
the reflective structure of the object, then this theory finds its supplement
in an injunction for the subject to resist those modes of objectivity that
instrumentalize the subject. Thus Benjamin’s critique of capitalism begins
precisely with an examination of the manner in which capitalism estab-
lishes an anti-critical asymmetry between the subject of experience and
the object of production. As Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings write,
“[t]he debasement of the human sensory and cognitive capacities is an
operative feature in the maintenance of the power of capital”.65 Indeed,
it seems that Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, as a social relation
that conceals itself as a relation between things, becomes a key element in

Benjamin’s understanding of what it means to be critical of modern society
as representing a ‘loss of experience’. Throughout his work he critiques
capitalism by understanding it as a real social structure that stifles mimetic
knowledge and engenders anti-critical modes of thinking and action. I
believe that this distinctive critical stance toward capitalism finds it most
original and clear formulation in an early text, ‘Capitalism as Religion’
(1921), which will also serve to reinforce the continuity between his work
on the concept of criticism and his stance as a critic of capitalism. There
are two related features of capitalism that Benjamin criticizes in this text as
anti-critical: one is the element of debt or guilt (Schuld), and the other is
the element of inflation.
Even Benjamin’s later, more explicitly Marxist texts challenge Marxist
orthodoxy in reconfiguring the standard relation between the cultural
superstructure and the economic substructure.66 In Marxist theory, the
critique of ideology runs the risk of becoming a derivative and circular
component of the materialist critique: any element of culture threatens
to be labeled false consciousness to the extent that it coexists with the
economic structure. Any mode of aesthetic experience is ideological to the
very extent that it is aesthetic experience and hence not directly engaged
with concrete transformation of social relations. Benjamin’s solution to
this circularity is to undertake a discerning analysis of the superstructure
itself, showing that aesthetic experience undergoes fundamental trans-
formations that open up a space between merely ideological culture and
revolutionary culture. Thus his later work, specifically the ‘Artwork’ essay,
seeks to diagnose the specific modes of aesthetic experience in their mate-
rial conditions as either progressive or reactionary and fascist. This critique
of capitalism installs itself within the structure of experience, as a critical
problem, without ignoring how experience is structured by its material
circumstances. This method of criticizing capitalism as a phenomenon that
reproduces itself in and through the superstructure finds its first formula-
tion in the early fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’.
In critiquing capitalism as a form of religion, Benjamin is not merely
addressing the ‘ideology’ of capitalism, the culture of capitalism, or the
blindly deterministic belief in markets, as opposed to the literal productive
system of market relations that characterizes the capitalist economy. He
is not repeating a Weberian analysis of how certain features of Protestant
Christianity condition and make possible a capitalist way of organizing
production, but instead he means to show that capitalism is, in its very
156 N. ROSS
system of organizing people and reproducing itself, a form of religion.

It is not merely analogous to other religions: it is rather an outgrowth of
religion that actually threatens to end all other religions. Thus to claim
that capitalism is a religion is not merely to critique it from a secular per-
spective, as if religion inherently involved mystification from which we
have to free ourselves. It is rather to critique capitalism as a radical form
of mystification that replaces all others and thus removes the experiential
core of religion.
An essential defining feature in Benjamin’s concept of religion is the
experience of guilt, or to follow the meaning of the German term Schuld,
a pervasive sense of indebtedness. In noting this “diabolical ambiguity” in
the German term, as both an economic term and as constitutive of reli-
gious consciousness, Benjamin follows an insight of Nietzsche. In On the
Geneology of Morals, Nietzsche argues that archaic societies demonstrate
feelings of ‘debt’ that connect younger generations to the elders. This
sense of indebtedness grows so great that it can no longer be regulated
in social interactions and becomes a pervasive sense of ‘guilt’ to the cre-
ator. However, the radicalization of debt is tied to the possibility of atone-
ment: the religious community might offer the possibility of atonement
through good conduct, through punishment (which discharges the debt),
or through ‘faith’ alone, that is through the complete subjective identifica-
tion with the will of the one to whom one is indebted.
Benjamin takes Nietzsche’s argument about the self-generating, con-
stitutive quality of debt in religious consciousness even further in exam-
ining the role of debt in capitalist society. What is radical in capitalism,
in comparison to other forms of religion, is that “Capitalism is probably
the first instance of a cult that produces guilt, not atonement”.67 If in
Nietzsche’s argument, religion makes sick in order to offer a remedy,
in Benjamin’s interpretation of capitalism as a religion, it makes sick in
such a way as to establish absolute despair of any remedy as a universal
condition. In the capitalist cult, guilt is pervasive in the radical sense
that there is no longer a distinction between creditor and debtor, but
even ‘God’ is brought into the nexus of guilt. “A vast sense of guilt that
is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt, but
in order to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so
as at once to include God within the context of guilt”.68 In that God is
drawn into the nexus of guilt, the nature of consciousness’ debt changes
so that it is no longer a debt that can be discharged but one that can
only grow.
Here it is necessary to consider the debt not merely as a subjective

condition of people within society but as an organizing principle of the
capitalist economic system through which it reproduces itself and expands.
Insofar as capital owns most resources in society, and human labor exists in
order to create a surplus labor value for capital, there is a sense in which all
human activity is caught up in a constant cycle of repaying capital. Even the
investor, the presumed owner of capital, is still not the sovereign owner,
who can dispose over resources according to his wishes, but is merely ‘cap-
ital embodied with a will’; that is, even the investor must ruthlessly follow
the dictates of increasingly profitable exchange or be dispossessed by a
more ruthless investor. Thus all human activity, labor, thought, planning,
and even enjoyment, is endowed with an intense consciousness of debt: it
may only exist to the extent that it profits capital to an increasing degree,
and it only generates a profit through allowing its own surplus labor value
to be appropriated by another. Debt thus characterizes the relation of the
worker to the employer, the relation of the employer to capital markets,
the relation of capital owner to the act of investing, and even the relation
of the consumer to industry. It seems that this is what Benjamin means in
arguing that in the capitalist religion, ‘even God is drawn into the nexus of
guilt’: it is no longer the matter of being indebted to a greater power with
a sovereign will of its own. The Christian religion regards atonement as
possible because ultimately one’s debt is to God, who possesses subjective
qualities such as love, forgiveness, and understanding. But in organizing a
cultic religion around capital, there is no sovereign pole, no creditor who
corresponds to the debtor. He writes: “(Capitalism) is the expansion of
despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world”.69 Despair, in
Benjamin’s term, is the state of guilt that is so powerful because it has lost
any hope of a life in the future that is free from guilt.
In radicalizing the notion of debt in this way, we see why capitalism is
the object of negative critique par excellence for Benjamin, just as art is the
object of positive critique par excellence for the Romantics. While Benjamin’s
Romantics conceive of art as a structure of activity that inherently engenders
the reflective identification between the subject and the object, he conceives
of capitalism as a mode of production motivated by debt that cannot be
discharged and thus inherently anti-critical. Consciousness in a state of debt
is religious consciousness because it cannot justify its own existence except
through servitude and loyalty to a greater power, and capitalist conscious-
ness in radically religious in that it cannot even tolerate the possibility of
sovereign consciousness for others or at a future time. Because the debt
158 N. ROSS
that motivates production in capitalism is not a relation of debt between

debtor and creditor or even between individual and society, it is a kind of
absolute horizon for all thought and action that precludes any possibility of
reflection. The theme of redemption stands in inverse relation in Benjamin’s
philosophy of art and his critique of capitalism: to critique, following the
Romantic conception, means to redeem an object from its merely instru-
mental context and treat it as a subjectivity, while capitalism is a system of
belief that forces all thought and action into an instrumental context from
which there is no redemption.
However, Benjamin’s critique of capitalism as a religion holds fast to
the possibility of redemption: the more pervasive and immanent the rela-
tion of debt becomes to consciousness, the more redemption comes into
view as a possibility of action. He writes of a potential link between the
pervasiveness of debt as a form of universal despair and the possibility of
hope: “The nature of the religious movement of capitalism entails endur-
ance right up to the end, to the point where God too finally takes on the
entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe is finally taken over
by the despair which is actually its secret hope”. And: “It is the expansion
of despair until it becomes a religious state of the world, in the hope that
this will lead to redemption”.70 In linking despair and redemption in this
way, Benjamin anticipates a remarkable passage from Adorno at the end
of Minima Moralia: “The only philosophy that that can responsibly be
practiced in the face of despair is to contemplate all things as they would
present themselves from the standpoint of redemption”.71 However, in
the framework of this text, how does Benjamin conceive of the relation
between pervasive, despairing guilt and the possibility of redemption?
It might be tempting to call to mind the view of some Marxists that
capitalism must be allowed to develop to its extreme so that it can arrive
at the ultimate catastrophe that would lead to its collapse. Such Marxists
oppose labor unions and social democracy because they are half-measures
that merely preserve the system, rather than allowing it to develop its own
contradictions. Could it be the case that Benjamin sees such a dialecti-
cal progression at work between the despair engendered by the pervasive
indebtedness of capitalist consciousness and the eventual emergence of a
consciousness that is completely immune to mystification because it has
reached the point of complete despair? Such a teleological view of history
runs counter to Benjamin’s later ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,
which reject the faith in progress as an ideological mode of justifying suf-
fering in the present and which argue that redemption only has meaning
as a practice toward the past, not toward the future.72 Even in the brief
fragment under discussion, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, he rejects the notion
that there is a dialectical link between despair and redemption from guilt,
a view that he associates with both Nietzsche and Marx in different ways.
He writes:
The paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently formulated by

Nietzsche’s philosophy … (Nietzsche’s) Übermensch is the man who has
arrived where he is at without changing his ways; he is historical man who
has grown up right through the sky … Marx is a similar case: the capitalism
that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of the simple and
compound interest that are functions of Schuld.73
In this final passage of the fragmentary text, Benjamin argues that the
belief in some kind of miraculous transition between despairing man and
Übermensch or between capitalist economy and socialism is itself a prod-
uct of indebted consciousness. Both of these views see redemption not
as a real transformation of consciousness, brought about by knowledge
that transforms its object, but as a kind of reward conferred for loyalty to
a structure in which one is not sovereign. This passage already suggests
the way that the later Benjamin would distinguish himself from orthodox
Marxism, which views the suffering of the proletariat in present society as
a necessary means for future utopia and which orients itself in materialist
terms toward the teleological view of redemption as a product of historical
suffering. Although the text ends at this point, without any explanation
of how Benjamin thinks of the relation between totally pervasive guilt
and redemption, it is here that the notion of criticism from Benjamin’s
thought seems most applicable. It might be asked, what is the political or
transformative point of critiquing capitalism as religion?74 I argue that it is
not Benjamin’s point in this text to establish a simple critical juxtaposition
between religious consciousness and secular consciousness. Rather, it is to
reveal capitalism as a particularly pernicious form of religious conscious-
ness by showing the way that it radicalizes the need upon which religion
rests. In this context, it is illuminating to compare this pernicious form
of religious consciousness to the kind of secular mysticism that Benjamin
finds in the Romantics, with their notion of immanent critique as a process
of redeeming things from their purely instrumental context.
It is worth noting that Benjamin’s thesis on the religious core of capi-
talism intersects with one of the most important figures in his work as a
160 N. ROSS
literary critic: Franz Kafka. Benjamin challenged the first generation of

Kafka scholars who sought an overtly theological message in his writings.
Instead, Benjamin proposes that the central problem for Kafka is the orga-
nization of people within society, a point he illustrates in a radio address
on Kafka’s story ‘On the Building of the Great Wall of China’. The expe-
rience of guilt is clearly a major theme and perhaps even an organizing
experience in Kafka’s writings: what fascinates Benjamin the most is that
Kafka demonstrates the truly insidious power that guilt has when it is
freed from an overtly theological context and enters into the experience of
the contemporary, secular city dweller. Josef K.’s guilt is not conditioned
by a theological belief but, as Benjamin writes, is a guilt that emerges
out of “everyday situations, in backyards or waiting rooms”.75 Ultimately,
his guilt emerges from his desire to understand the inaccessible organiz-
ing principle of the social world in which he lives. Benjamin also found
in Kafka the most promising elements of a redemption from this state
of guilt: “It is fear of an unknown guilt and atonement that brings this
one blessing: it makes the guilt explicit”.76 Kafka’s great achievement is to
make the reflection on guilt into a truly infinite experience that engenders
incessant reflection, much like the Romantic medium of reflection:
The reflections to which (Kafka’s writings) give rise are interminable …

They are pregnant with a moral to which they never give birth … It is the
fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true workings of grace
in his writings. The fact that the law never finds expression as such—this and
nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the fragment.77
This passage offers both a remarkably positive interpretation of one of the

most difficult points in Kafka scholarship (why he left his novels unfin-
ished) and, even more, a remarkable synthesis of Benjamin’s critique of
capitalism and his interpretation of Romanticism. That is, Benjamin inter-
prets the fragmentary nature of Kafka’s greatest works not as a failure
but as a formal response to the pervasive kind of guilt that animates their
plots. By failing to complete the plots of his novels, Kafka offers ‘the gra-
cious dispensation of the fragment’—a phrase in which we must hear some
resonance of the Romantic theory of the fragment as well as Benjamin’s
interpretation of the medium of reflection. The way that Kafka describes
guilt as the nature of modern life mirrors Benjamin’s interpretation of cap-
italism as religion, yet the way that he grants an escape from guilt through
the fragmentation of form mirrors Benjamin’s understanding of critique
as redeeming an object from its instrumental context by treating it as a

medium of infinite reflection.
There is another equally significant pole to Benjamin’s critique of capi-
talism that emerges most clearly in a text titled ‘Imperial Panorama’ from
One Way Street: inflation. Benjamin had a crushing personal experience
with German inflation, as his father’s fortune was wiped out by the pace of
inflation in the post-war years. In the essay in which he presents his famous
thesis on the ‘loss of experience’, ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin considers the
rapid inflation of the post-war years as an image for the way in which the
ability of individuals to exchange experiences is undermined by the rap-
idly changing social conditions. However, in ‘Imperial Panorama: A Tour
through German Inflation’, Benjamin analyzes inflation not merely as a
temporary economic occurrence but as a pervasive structure of conscious-
ness that is endemic to capitalism. As he writes, those affluent Germans
who experience inflation as a sudden crisis fail to perceive the extent to
which their very property and their former position of privilege were actu-
ally founded on the very same inflationary tendency that they now lament
because it is dispossessing them of their property and even their possibility
to work. Behind the apparent irregularity or market failure of the depres-
sion is the deeper stability of inflation in all capitalist growth, as a force that
mandates that work can only be had and property only be maintained so
long as it engages in a more intensive cultivation of surplus labor. He writes:
Because the relative stabilization of the pre-war years benefited him he feels
compelled to regard any state that dispossesses him as unstable. But stable
conditions need by no means be pleasant conditions, and even before the
war there were those for whom stabilized conditions were stabilized wretch-
edness. To decline is stable, no more surprising than to rise. Only a view
that acknowledges downfall as the sole reason for the present situation can
advance beyond enervating amazement at what is daily repeated, and per-
ceive the phenomena of decline as stability itself and rescue alone as extraor-
dinary, verging on the marvelous and incomprehensible.78
This passage relates the experience of inflation to a central theme in

Benjamin’s philosophy of history: the way in which the faith in progress
often serves to conceal suffering and undermine the possibility of real
social change.
Benjamin treats inflation as the real economic truth content of the
bourgeois notion of progress, which can only be demystified when the
bourgeoisie experiences expropriation as the condition on which their
162 N. ROSS
prior property rested. Inflation really represents an alienated form of prog-

ress, because it embodies a rapid pace of change that is steered by the
change in the medium of exchange, rather than any change in human
consciousness. This pace of change is so great that it outstrips the ability
of the subject to experience any social meaning in economic occurrences,
any exchange of products of labor, and eventually undermines the very
ability to exchange experiences. In a manner reminiscent of his work on
the decline of storytelling, he writes of how the inflation of the post-war
years has undermined the ability to have a conversation:
The freedom of conversation is being lost. If, earlier, it was a matter of course
in conversation to take interest in one’s interlocutor, now this is replaced by
inquiry into the cost of his shoes or umbrella. Irresistibly intruding on any
convivial exchange is the theme of the conditions of life, of money. It is as if
one were trapped in a theater and had to follow the events on stage whether
one wanted to or not—had to make them again and again, willingly and
unwillingly, the subject of one’s thought and speech.79
Benjamin argues that the forced preoccupation with cost of living

engenders a fundamentally different way of exchanging experiences
and, ultimately, a decline in the very faculty of mimesis. In Benjamin’s
writings on language and art, the word is a mimetic response to the
language of things, and so at the root of language is a kind of exchange
in which the truth is produced out of a kind of reciprocally creative
act. However here Benjamin considers how the medium of exchange,
money, is now perverting this relationship so that rather than mimeti-
cally responding to things, conversation is compelled to relate them
as commodities to the rapidly changing context of exchange. When
Benjamin writes of the ‘denaturing’ of things in this text on German
inflation, he essentially has in mind a sickness at the heart of speech and
experience.80 For example, he writes of how the evolution of manufac-
tured items mandates that they become signs of how much was spent
on them: “Each thing stamps its owner, leaving only the possibility
of appearing a starveling or a racketeer”.81 Rather than a language of
things, to which we may respond with a name, there is a language of
commodities that dominates human speech and thought by compelling
attention to their exchange value. And this exchange value is in such
rapid flux that it leaves the bearer of its value with no middle option
between starveling and racketeer.
At its root, Benjamin’s exploration of the phenomenon of inflation is

guided by a similar intuition as his treatment of capitalism as a form of
religion. In each case, he seeks to show the mystifying tendency at the root
of economic developments. Departing from Marx’s insight into the fetish-
ism of commodities, he demonstrates specific structures of consciousness,
such as the consciousness of debt and the consciousness that is bound
by inflation, that stifle the ability to experience the social conditions of
life in such a way that we could respond to them critically. The debt or
guilt inculcated by capitalism is radical and constitutive of society in that it
resolves the creditor–debtor relationship into a universal requirement for
all action to generate surplus labor value, while the phenomenon of infla-
tion reveals a more fundamental tendency for capitalist growth to occur in
a way that undermines the possibility for humans to relate to the objects
of their shared experience as objects of common experience.
4 The Disillusioning of Mimesis in Film
As I have argued, what is truly distinctive in Benjamin’s critique of capi-

talism expresses itself in his thesis on the loss of experience. In the prior
section, I argued that this loss of experience occurs because of the pre-
dominance of debt/guilt-producing modes of production and thought
in modern culture. The theory of criticism that Benjamin develops out of
the Romantics as well as the theory of mimetic knowledge that he devel-
ops in the 1920s find their negative reflection in his critique of capitalism:
capitalism is for Benjamin an inherently mystifying, anti-critical relation
between the world of production and subjectivity because it involves con-
sciousness in a rapidly inflating relation of debt. My work has up to this
point demonstrated this inverse relation between his conception of criti-
cism and his critique of capitalism, yet it leaves his theoretical enterprise
in a kind of suspended animation: how is critical experience even possible
in the face of such a radically despairing vision of the modern world? Is
experience irredeemably lost? Can aesthetic experience play any role in
critiquing capitalism? Benjamin’s thesis on the loss of experience seems to
eliminate the very ground on which a critique of the impasse could occur.
I believe an answer to these questions may be found in Benjamin’s late
masterpiece on aesthetic theory, ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility’, a work that embodies a great philosophical optimism
toward the political possibilities of new artistic media and aesthetic forms.
In this work, Benjamin reactivates the theory of aesthetic experience by
164 N. ROSS
developing an analysis of the transformation that apperception undergoes

in confronting new forms of art such as photography and especially film.
He undertakes his analysis of aesthetic experience in a manner that is both
materialist and prognostic: materialist, in that he seeks to show how the
faculty of perception and the manner in which perceptions transform a
subject are mediated through the material, technological possibilities of
aesthetic experience; and prognostic, in that he seeks to interpret the politi-
cal meaning of these transformations in aesthetic experience as counters to
the dangers he sees in capitalism verging on fascism. What emerges from
this account of aesthetic experience is not merely the normative demand
that art should articulate a message contrary to capitalism but far more a
description of a new mode of apperception emerging out of art that would
act inherently to critique capitalism.
Most readers will know Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘On the
Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ from its final
version as a text that examines the transformation that the arts undergo
when they are no longer tied to their unique individuality and become
inherently reproductions. The text famously argues that what character-
izes this transformation is a ‘loss of aura’ in the artwork, and it has been
interpreted as presenting a series of phenomenal transformations in the
arts, without giving any deeper theoretical grasp of the meaning of these
phenomena.82 What becomes challenging is to interpret the immense
experiential and political stakes that Benjamin attributes to this shift in
the meaning of art. In what follows, I will argue that what is at stake for
Benjamin in this transformation of art is nothing less than a dialectical
interpretation of the world-historical relation of human beings to the
natural. The form of aesthetic experience becomes the tipping point for
Benjamin at which we find the potential to transform the underlying
technique of nature upon which human societies depend. “Just as the
entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long histori-
cal periods, so too does their mode of perception”.83 This is the sense in
which Benjamin develops a materialist aesthetics. Aesthetics, as the study
of how human perception is organized in and through cultural artifacts,
gains its normative, political, and world-historical meaning for Benjamin
in that it reveals the potential turning points and realizable shifts within
the human relation to nature. We will see that Benjamin is not a thinker
who has an ‘antipathy to nature’84 but that his materialist aesthetics is
concerned with critiquing an overly instrumental and exploitive relation
to the natural and preparing the possibility for a relation to nature that
involves a deep balance founded on openness and reciprocity between

human and nature.
The essay establishes a variety of dialectical oppositions: the distinction
between auratic and non-auratic art, the ritual value as opposed to the
exhibition value of art, the two forms of mimesis (semblance and play),
the contrast between fascism as aestheticized politics and communism as
politicized aesthetics, the critique of capitalism in relation to newer aes-
thetic possibilities.85 However, all of these phenomenal distinctions that
Benjamin makes only gain their world-historical stakes for him in that they
allow us to diagnose the potential transition between two distinctive rela-
tions to nature: what he calls the first and the second technology.86 The
first technology rests upon using nature, while the second technology rests
upon interacting with nature. For Benjamin, the first, exploitive technol-
ogy only continues to have a hold on human life because it is rooted in a
mode of aesthetic experience that is not yet fully adequate to the potential
generated by the disappearance of aura.
We shall begin with the phenomenon at the heart of Benjamin’s aes-
thetic diagnosis: the loss of aura in contemporary art. He writes: “What
then is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique appari-
tion of distance, however near it might be. To follow with the eye—while
resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a
branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of
those mountains, of that branch”.87 Benjamin uses a metaphor from the
perception of nature to indicate something crucial to art for most of its
history: that it rests on the technique of making distance and vertical dis-
tinction of rank into something that can be seen and felt as the nearness
of distance.88 For Benjamin, this is perhaps most apparent in the role of
art within religious rituals, where it is not even meant to be enjoyed or
even seen, in some cases, but meant to reinforce the feeling of distinction
between sacred and profane. The prevalence of the phenomenon of aura
within aesthetic creation and experience reveals the existence of a society
that is organized around rituals that reinforce the feeling of hierarchy.
Benjamin’s thesis on the decline of aura relates to a broader theme
in his work: the mimetic nature of art. Throughout his earlier aesthetic
thinking, Benjamin views the function of art as essentially mimetic, as I
argued in the second section. However, in a challenge to the Platonic con-
ception of mimesis, Benjamin is concerned with the capacity of mimesis to
produce truth in a unique, aesthetic manner. Much like Adorno after him,
Benjamin criticizes contemporary, rationalized culture with losing the
166 N. ROSS
distinctively mimetic mode of comportment that would allow us to gain

some ‘experience’ from our engagement with the world. Benjamin’s phi-
losophy of mimesis rests on a critical distinction between different forms
of mimesis: it is possible for art to imitate nature in a way that renders
nature unknowable and inaccessible to experience, but it is also possible
for it to produce truth. Art is not merely the imitation of natural objects
but the rehearsal of a way of interacting with the natural. Yet this raises a
difficult question that would later become the most significant philosophi-
cal question occupying Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: how is it possible for art
to be ‘true’ as a mode of mimesis? For Benjamin (as well as Adorno) it is
not a matter of realism but of distinguishing the ways in which mimesis
can transform consciousness and make it capable of negating an untrue
relation to nature. And this concern over the potential veracity of mimesis
reaches its point of greatest dialectical sharpness in the second version of
Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay. Here he argues in a long footnote (that does
not make its way into the third and final version of the text) for a distinc-
tion between two modes of mimesis: semblance and play, Schein and Spiel.
While he equates semblance with the auratic mode of aesthetic experience,
which is coming to an end, he argues that this end frees the way for a new
mode of mimesis, namely play.89
The distinction between semblance and play can be explained as fol-
lows: a painting can function and be conceived of as the use of color to
simulate the experience of a natural object. This is semblance. Or it can
function and be conceived of as the use of color to reveal the possibili-
ties of color as an object of experience. The sculpture can use stone to
simulate human flesh and evoke the divine in human form, or it can reveal
in a creative manner the nature of stone; it can present variations on the
structure of its material that are open and provisional and hence playful.
Of course these examples do not yet even include the technological shift
in the medium itself that Benjamin grapples within the essay. Yet the dis-
tinction between semblance and play has deep significance in revealing the
systematic context in which Benjamin’s considerations on the loss of aura
stand. It is not merely the loss of one mode of experience that concerns
Benjamin but the way that this loss dialectically opens up the possibility for
a new way of interacting with the material that underlies it.
In order to unlock the dialectical distinction that Benjamin means
to make with respect to the two forms of mimesis, we must first under-
stand what he means with the first form of mimesis, Schein, and how he
relates it to the phenomenon of aura that he describes in the artwork
essay.90 Benjamin cites Goethe as giving the most adequate articulation

of the aesthetics of Schein: “The beautiful is neither the veil nor the
veiled object but rather the object in its veil”.91 For Goethe, this notion
of semblance is characteristic not only of art but of the philosophy of
nature. In Goethe, nature is only knowable insofar as it is beautiful, and
its beauty consists in the way that we intuit it as the veil of ideal forms of
development. If we strip away the veil, however, and seek to know it in
itself, it disappears and becomes unknowable. But Schiller and Hegel are
equally significant as theorists of aesthetic semblance: Hegel defines art
as the sensible semblance of the idea, but unlike Goethe, he considers it
a relatively inadequate form of presentation that cannot satisfy the needs
of the modern mind for explicitly conceptual content. (Benjamin does
not consider Schiller, whose notion of semblance would problematize
the distinction at the heart of Benjamin’s argument.)92 In each case,
the notion of aesthetic experience revolves around the experience of the
nearness of distance, the visible as a conduit for the invisible, which
Benjamin equates with aura. He writes: “The significance of beautiful
semblance is rooted in the age of auratic perception that is now coming
to an end … The decline of this view makes it doubly urgent that we
look back at its origin. This lies in mimesis as the primal phenomenon
of all artistic activity”.93 In his dissertation on the German Romantics,
Benjamin already ascribed to them the thesis on the ‘decline of the beau-
tiful’, and so he sees them as forerunners to a conception of art that
breaks with the phenomenon of aura. In order to understand the true
philosophical stakes involved in the phenomenon of aura, and its loss,
we have to consider the way that Benjamin contrasts it with the polar
opposite aspect of art, play.
Here is the key passage from the essay in which Benjamin articulates
mimesis in this way as an oppositional structure:
Thus we encounter the polarity informing mimesis. In mimesis, tightly

interfolded like cotyledons, slumber the two aspects of art: semblance and
play. This polarity can interest the dialectician only if it has a historical role.
And that is, in fact, the case. This role is in fact determined by the first and
second technologies. Semblance is in fact the most abstract—but therefore
the most ubiquitous—schema of all the magic procedures of the first tech-
nology, whereas play is the inexhaustible reservoir of all the experimenting
procedures of the second … (This would then) lead to a practical insight—
namely that what is lost in the withering of semblance and the decay of aura
in works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play (Spiel-Raum)
168 N. ROSS
… In film, the element of semblance has been entirely displaced by the ele-
ment of play.94
In this passage, Benjamin argues that we interpret the loss of aura as the
cutting edge in a critical distinction between two technical ways of relat-
ing to the natural. He argues that aura and semblance are the perceptual
operations that underlie a way of interacting with nature that he calls ‘the
first technology’. For Benjamin, the first technology is characteristic of
both the archaic relation to nature as well as capitalism (this is a key theme
in early critical theory: that capitalism is actually based on the repetition of
an archaic form of society under modern conditions). The first technology
is one that organizes nature as a resource to be exploited: it is a material
that is outside of us, which we use and use up in a quantitative fashion to
preserve ourselves at a distance from it. Of course, the relation of human
to nature always also indicates the relation of humans to each other. If
we see nature only as a material to be used, then we also see the natural
within the human as a force to be exploited for gain. We stand squarely
within the first technology when we treat each other as ‘labor power’ or
‘human resources’, and human relations are organized around the mutual
use of each other’s labor. One of the key themes from Marx’s theory that
Benjamin adopts in his philosophy of technology is the notion that capital-
ism creates a technology that would reduce the necessary labor time and
yet it establishes property relations that do not enable us to reduce the
amount of labor to which we are subject. Modern technologies offer pos-
sibilities to live together with the earth in non-extractive ways and to make
labor into something frictionless and interactive rather than exploitive,
and yet these technologies are entrenched in a political property struc-
ture that must increase the level of extraction and exploitation in order
to remain in place. However, for Benjamin, unlike for Marx, aesthetic
experience becomes the key for understanding how to bring about this
second technology.
The challenge in this passage is to understand how this first technology
is related to the notions of aura and semblance. He writes: “Semblance
is in fact the most abstract—but therefore the most ubiquitous—schema
of all the magic procedures of the first technology, whereas play is the
inexhaustible reservoir of all the experimenting procedures of the sec-
ond”.95 This key point in Benjamin’s argument rests on the link between
the first technology, which organizes the human relation to nature around
objectifying extraction, and the aesthetic procedure of sacrifice and magic.
We have to believe, in a pre-reflective way, in a need for distance between

ourselves and nature, and in the need for nature (even in ourselves) to
be sacrificed, in order for this first technology to remain compelling even
when other ways of existing with nature would be technically possible.
Art can reinforce this belief to the extent that it organizes our percep-
tion of nature around semblance. The first technology rests on a mode of
organizing perception that Benjamin equates to magic: it is a trick played
on the percipient to establish a passive and distant relation to the underly-
ing technical procedure. The opposite of such a procedure is not merely
the disillusioning of perception but a mode of perception that allows the
percipient to intervene in a non-established way in the material process of
nature in a way that involves both reciprocity and unpredictability. The
contrast at work in the essay is not one between art as illusion and art as
realistic depiction, a distinction that would point toward the realist aes-
thetics of thinkers such as Lukacs and Siegfried Kracauer: rather it is a mat-
ter of understanding how the contrast between semblance and play maps
onto the distinction between the first and second technology:
The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second
aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. The primary social
function of art today is to rehearse that interplay. This applies especially to
the function of film. The function of film is to train the human being in the
apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with an apparatus whose role in
their lives is expanding almost daily.96
For Benjamin, we see that film opens up a new mode of aesthetic experi-
ence, in which we anticipate a new relation to nature, a new relation to
the material world. How does it accomplish the rehearsal of this interplay?
This problematic leads Benjamin to a striking metaphor for this shift
within the task of artist: while the artist of the first mimesis is like a magi-
cian, the artist of the second mimesis is like a surgeon. Like the magician,
the painter of natural semblance presents a view of nature that maintains
the distance between the viewer and object, but like the surgeon, the film-
maker dissects reality, enters into a natural process in such a way as to
reveal its unfinished, provisional space of contingency. The painting offers
a view of nature that is rounded out to completion, while the film offers
a series of provisional, experimental views of nature. Just as the surgeon
breaks the body’s natural surface and enters into it in order to achieve a
practical intervention in its functioning, the film breaks apart our view of a
170 N. ROSS
common set of social actions in order to insert play in the place of drudg-
ery. Film is not merely more realistic or microscopic than the auratic arts
but more surrealistic, in that it captures the deep contingency and brute
facticity of the material world in a way that makes it uncanny to us.
Benjamin thus establishes the distinction between the finished and
the provisional as the key experiential feature in distinguishing the two
modes of mimesis and relating them to the first or second technology:
“The results of the first technology are valid once and for all (it deals
with irreparable lapse of sacrificial death, which holds good for eternity).
The results of the second are wholly provisional (it operates by means of
experiments and endlessly varied test procedures)”.97 The first technology
operates on the model of extracting from nature and creating a product,
while the second operates on that of an interactive, frictionless, reciprocal
metabolism with nature. For Benjamin, this distinction is reflected also in
two different modes of artistic creation, one in which the goal is a finished
product, and the other in which the creative process involves constitu-
tive provisionality. “The state of their technology compelled the Greeks
to produce eternal values in their art … Film (on the other hand) is the
artwork most capable of improvement. And this capability is linked to its
radical renunciation of eternal value”.98 He refers here to the way in which
Charlie Chaplin would make a film by shooting thousands of minutes
of experimental performances only in order to weave them into a film
through editing. This closely echoes what Benjamin wrote in his disserta-
tion on German Romanticism on the notion of the fragment: while the
fragment of an ancient statue is fragmentary in the sense that it is a broken
part of what was meant to be taken as a finished product, a semblance, the
Romantic fragment is inherently fragmentary in that it aims to present an
incomplete unit of thought that offers space for further development. It
would just have to be added that film is now provisional not merely in a
conceptual sense that it presents a thought that is in the state of becoming
but in its very way of organizing the relation of perception to nature.99
Benjamin gives two concrete phenomena from film-making as illustra-
tions of this provisional, playful relation to nature: first, the altered role
of the actor in film, as opposed to theater, and second, the way that film
reveals the physical environment of the city. While in the theater, an actor
creates a semblance, that is, evokes a unified character through the projec-
tive use of voice and gesture, the actor in film is simply responding to a
series of promptings from the director or even from machines. The film
director, for example, might get the actor to seem afraid by making a loud
noise. Or the director might use a crowd of ordinary people from the
street to create a mob scene. Benjamin writes of the role of the actor in
modern film: “For the first time—and this is the effect of film—the human
being is placed in a position where he has to operate with his whole living
person, while foregoing its aura”.100 The actor is placed in this position
by the way that film uses the actor to achieve a result that transcends the
actor’s own creative vision.101
Benjamin’s discussion of the position of the actor here rests on a Marxist
insight about the nature of industrial labor: Marx shows that modern
industry is designed in a way so that the tool uses the worker, rather than
the worker using the tool, a point that is demonstrated to great comi-
cal effect by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The film is, according to
Benjamin, the artistic equivalent of such a relation between subject and
technology. He interprets this inversion of ends and means through tech-
nology as an essential experience of modern life, which he calls a ‘test’:
the subject is constantly responding to promptings to adapt her capacity
to the functional requirements of an ever expanding technological system,
a pattern that holds in school, sports, labor, and even in the way that the
actor in film has to practice her craft. While this relation of technology
to subjectivity is essentially a form of alienated labor in Marx’s theory,
Benjamin argues that it takes on a redemptive significance when it enters
into aesthetic mimesis. He writes: “Film makes test performances capable
of being exhibited, by turning that ability itself into a test … To accom-
plish it is to preserve one’s humanity in the face of the apparatus”.102 For
Benjamin, there is a basic sense in which the position of the ‘actor’ in rela-
tion to the director and the audience mimes the relation of the laborer to
the means of production, and in so doing, it actually allows us to experi-
ence that which is stifling and oppressive in a revelatory and playful way
a relation. We might say that once such a central feature of modern life
becomes an aesthetic experience, it becomes possible for the subject to
develop a kind of immunity to its inevitability.
The politically enlightening potential of film derives from the way that
it can reveal an ‘optical unconsciousness’: it offers the tools for reveal-
ing features of daily life that are pervasive yet fall below the threshold of
ordinary perception. Just as Freud taught us to pay attention to the hid-
den structure of dream symbolism or the potential significance of a slip of
the tongue, film allows us to focus our attention on visual features of our
daily interaction with our environment that would otherwise remain in
the background.
172 N. ROSS
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of famil-

iar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guid-
ance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension
of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to
assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action (Spielraum).103
Benjamin ties this revealing of an optical unconscious to the cause of lib-

eration from oppressive aspects of our daily metabolism with nature, those
remnants of the archaic first technology that capitalism preserves. Just as
psychoanalysis seeks to reveal subconscious impulses in order to free us
from their pathological compulsion, film has the potential to make us aware
of those little aspects of our technically mediated interplay with nature that
are stifling and compulsive in order to free us from their tyranny. Here we
might consider the importance of depictions of factory labor in early films,
from the Lumiére brothers to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The visual
depiction of such labor cannot in itself liberate us from the need for labor,
but it can allow us to see spaces in which consciousness is trapped and thus
open up a ‘space of play’. In this sense, film represents for Benjamin the
epitome of a ‘nature perfecting mimesis’: by laying bare the hidden laws
of our social interplay with nature, it allows us gently to alter these laws by
making possible a playful relation to them.
Benjamin argues that this capacity of film to reveal an optical uncon-
scious leads not only to an enriched level of perception but a “deepening
of apperception”. He writes: “The enlargement of a snapshot does not
simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear;
it reveals entirely new structural transformations of the subject”.104 Thus
what is at stake here is not merely a new level of detail in perception but
a new attitude on the part of the subject. In fact, Benjamin sees in film
not so much an insertion of technology into our unconscious relation to
nature but rather a reversal in the predominant relation among the sub-
ject, technology, and nature.
Benjamin also captures this point about the revelatory nature of film:
The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between

human beings and the apparatus. Film achieves this goal not only in terms
of man’s presentation to himself, but also in terms of his r epresentation of
his environment by means of the apparatus … By close-ups of the things
around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring
commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film,
on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule
our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and

unexpected field of action (Spielraum).105
This passage suggests that film is a medium that allows us to look deeper
into the material relations that surround us in society, a thesis which invites
comparison to the social realist film theory of Siegfried Kracauer. And yet
it is clear in these passages that for Benjamin, the potential truth content
of film in depicting social reality is not so much a matter of social realism
but more a matter of surrealism: “It is through the camera that we first
discover the optical unconscious”.106 The film is more like a form of dream
analysis for Benjamin than like a microscope revealing undiscovered fac-
tual reality. For the realist, film is politically enlightening because it depicts
the hidden laws of our daily environment, the factory, schools, and so
on, while for Benjamin, it is politically useful because it depicts this same
world as if in a dream.
It should be noted in closing that Benjamin’s optimism about the new
potentials of film as an art form is tempered by his diagnosis of a pervasive
alternative: a limbo state results when the aura of art is liquidated in film,
but the property relations controlling film production do not allow the
development of the second mimesis.107 Film can certainly use phenomena
of semblance in an even more powerful manner to establish passivity and
hierarchy within mass, industrial culture. There is for Benjamin no neces-
sity that film serve a progressive role in promoting the critique of capital-
ism and the development of a ‘second technology’: he merely means to
show in a dialectical manner its potential to do so if employed in the prop-
erly critical manner. Film is at best ‘antidote’ to the first technology and
a ‘rehearsal’ of the second.108 (This is why I would argue that Benjamin’s
text remains a theory of aesthetic experience, rather than a theory of politi-
cal practice.)109 Thus it seems crucial to understand that what Benjamin
offers in his late aesthetics is not so much a universal theory of what film
is, the immutable laws by which it works; rather he uses some of these
very fleeting artistic phenomena to make a deeper critical point about
the nature of aesthetic experience. As I have argued, to think of aesthetic
experience in this way involves understanding the dialectical transforma-
tion of art into a form of mimesis that inserts provisionality, reciprocity,
and unpredictability into our perception of nature. Benjamin thus calls us
to think of art as true not in the sense of a correspondence theory of truth
but in terms of its ability to challenge what is false within our relation to
nature.110 With this way of thinking about art in terms of mimetic truth
174 N. ROSS
content, and of thinking aesthetic experience as a way to challenge and

transform dominant modes of consciousness, Benjamin sets the program
that would guide Adorno decades later in his fragmentary masterpiece,
Aesthetic Theory.
Benjamin’s prognosis of a new, progressive mode of aesthetic expe-
rience that rehearses a new social relation to nature rests on his effort
to decouple two different forms of the aesthetics: semblance and play.
We should remember that these are the two central strands of Schiller’s
theory of aesthetic experience. In the chapter on Schiller, I argued that for
Schiller, the ‘semblance’ (Schein) quality of aesthetic experience avoids the
regression to mere illusion and epistemic error precisely to the extent that
it takes on the quality of ‘play’, of a free give and take between subject
and nature.111 For Schiller, art’s ability to create a beautiful semblance
makes it a school for the post-Kantian model of freedom as play, because
it is just this quality that lifts us above the destitute relation to nature as
a mere material for use or data for cognition. By contrast, in Benjamin’s
later thinking, the semblance quality of art has to be ruthlessly critiqued
as a mode of aesthetic experience that, under modern conditions, can only
serve to establish distance, exploitation, and political passivity. Benjamin’s
thinking of mimesis establishes this Schillerian dialectic between sem-
blance and play as an oppositional dichotomy between the two sides of
art: mimesis harbors both the potential forecasted by Plato to foster mass
illusions that aid in the self-oppression of the subject and the pattern for a
relationship to nature that fundamentally undoes the history of exploita-
tion and domination. For Benjamin, the key to a critical philosophy of
aesthetic experience consists in becoming aware of this dangerous dual
possibility so that we can affirm the best possibilities of new forms of art.
Adorno is profoundly influenced by Benjamin’s philosophy of mimesis:
some of the core insights that Benjamin struggles to develop over several
works become assumptions at the outset of Adorno’s main works. In par-
ticular, Adorno absorbs the insight from the first section of this chapter,
the way in which Benjamin considers mimesis as a production of truth to
just the extent that it does not copy but re-inscribes the object’s latent
potential within a new order.112 However, Adorno rejects Benjamin’s
project of decoupling the two modes of mimesis, Schein and Spiel, as a
move that too quickly embraces the utopian efforts of modern technol-
ogy to liquidate the subjective, monadic quality of the arts.113 In this way,
the legacy of Schiller’s thought, his effort to redeem the aesthetic illusion
through the ontology of play, remains a point through which the debate
between Adorno and Benjamin can gain greater clarity. Ironically, it is at

just this point where Adorno rejects Benjamin’s thinking as ‘utopian’, as
offering too easy a link between new forms of aesthetic experience and
the redemption from social alienation, that connects Adorno to the core
conceptual schema of Schiller, often disregarded as a thinker of aesthetic
utopia.
5 Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to trace some of the threads that tie together
the disparate parts of this chapter on Benjamin’s philosophy of aesthetic
experience. The ‘Artwork’ essay represents a bold, critical attempt to
define the political and philosophical stakes involved in aesthetic experi-
ence. As I have argued, it represents a theory of aesthetic experience that
is both materialistic in its scope and prognostic in its critical intent. That
is, it seeks to show how the meaning of aesthetic experience is altered by
certain developments within the material media of experience, and it seeks
to isolate certain phenomena that have a positive significance in allowing
aesthetic experience to gain a politically progressive import in relation to
the social context of late capitalism and emerging fascism. He provides
an analysis of a mode of aesthetic experience in which we are made aware
of our role as subjects in constituting our perceptions, a playful, even
distracted mimesis that nevertheless immunizes us against some of the
exploitive effects of modern technology. But to what extent does this par-
ticular mode of aesthetic experience answer to the problems and demands
of Benjamin’s earlier thinking?
One of the central problems I explored throughout Benjamin’s early
thinking is his thesis on the ‘loss of experience’. That is, Benjamin finds
that the very capacity to have a critical experience, to absorb what is hap-
pening to us in a way that would allow us to respond with a critical under-
standing, is threatened by the religious structure of capitalism. He defines
experience as a capacity for recognizing affinities in a mimetic manner,
for finding a medium of reflection within the object of experience. We
could say that Benjamin reaches a certain impasse in his early thinking
on criticism, experience, and mimesis: he defines what it means to have a
critical experience through a constellation of concepts (mimesis, transla-
tion, medium of reflection), but he also develops an agonizing awareness
of the overwhelming features of modern life that stifle the possibility for
such a mode of experience (debt/guilt, inflationary culture, the withering
176 N. ROSS
of mimesis). In other words, in his early thought he both devises a positive

program (experience) and diagnoses a block in the achievement of this
program (loss of experience resulting out of capitalism).
I argue that Benjamin’s later philosophy of aesthetic experience in the
‘Artwork’ essay contains both of these elements from his earlier thinking
but in a manner that posits a solution to the block that he has diagnosed.
His ‘Artwork’ essay dwells on the radical, mystical, and surrealistic ele-
ments of film and new art forms, and it uses the concepts of play and the
liquidation of semblance to conceptualize this new form of aesthetic expe-
rience as distinctive and dialectically opposed to other, traditional features
of art. At the same time, the ‘Artwork’ essay shows that Benjamin has not
by any means abandoned his critical perspective on capitalism but deep-
ened it in such a way as to take it into his account of aesthetic experience.
The essay shows awareness of how capitalist forms of labor and planning
make us insensitive to a certain kind of attentiveness on which auratic art
forms had depended. But rather than simply lamenting the loss of such a
mode of experience, it argues that this particular loss frees new forms of
aesthetic experience, characterized by distraction, tactile absorption, and
playfulness, which are effectively able to immunize us against these dulling
or stifling features.
Let us consider how the notion of immunization operates: it is precisely
by taking the illness in an innocuous form that one protects oneself against
the deeper affliction. This immunization metaphor explains the way in
which Benjamin’s polarized account of aesthetic experience as playfulness
that liquidates semblance answers to the problem of the loss of experience
in his earlier work. That is, he describes an aesthetic medium that is able
to mime the very forces that rob us of experience, and he argues that it is
only an experience in such a medium that can grant the power to have an
aesthetic experience that is truly critical of the context of capitalism.
Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms. trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 229.
2. Howard Eiland and Micheal Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical
Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1.
3. Benjamin, SW 2.1, 840.
4. Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, 7.
5. See especially ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’,

Benjamin, SW 1, 101. See also Eiland and Jennings, Walter
Benjamin: A Critical Life, 103.
6. This passage recurs in both ‘Experience and Poverty’ and ‘The
Storyteller’ and will be analyzed in depth later in this chapter. See
Benjamin, SW 2.2, 731.
7. Benjamin is reported to have said this about Adorno to his cousin
Egon Wissing. Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical
Life, 359.
8. It is, of course, possible to criticize Benjamin’s essay purely as a
work of secondary literature and find many limitations, both in the
scope of Benjamin’s knowledge of German Romanticism and in
the way that he sometimes draws overly strong conclusions based
on limited textual evidence. Such an approach may be found in
Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the
Romantic Theory of Reflection’ in Walter Benjamin and
Romanticism, ed. Beatrice Hansen and Andrew Benjamin (London:
Continuum, 2002). It is obvious that Benjamin did not have access
to the range of texts that we have today. It seems more helpful to
read Benjamin’s essay not merely as an interpretation of Schlegel
and Novalis but more broadly as an effort to define the notion
criticism in a forward-looking way. This is in keeping with
Benjamin’s own methodological distinction between
Problemgeschichte and Geschichte der Philosophie: Benjamin does not
purport to give a definition of Romanticism but seeks historical
knowledge of the nature of criticism. Based on what I argued in
the prior chapter, it seems that Benjamin is closer to the spirit of
Jena Romanticism than many leading contemporary interpreters in
the way that he interprets art as a medium of knowledge rather
than interpreting the Romantics as offering a purely epistemic defi-
nition of knowledge.
9. See especially Benjamin SW 3, 127 and 137.
10. Rudolph Gasché correctly defines what is at stake in this method-
ological distinction and thus the interpretive horizon against which
Benjamin’s essay has to be considered: “It is a matter of analyzing
‘their own most proper intentions’. In other words, a philosophical
analysis, that is, an analysis regarded from an historic-problematic
has to focus on what, from a philosophical perspective, are the
most proper intentions of the Romantics concepts … Obviously,
178 N. ROSS
an interpretation of this kind may have to stretch the meaning of

their concepts well beyond what the Romantics themselves may
have intended them to say in order to bring out their philosophical
intentions.” Gasché, ‘The Sober Absolute’ in Walter Benjamin
and Romanticism, 53.
11. Hölderlin is not generally considered a member of the Romantic
circle that formed in Jena around 1800, but Benjamin’s frequent
references to Hölderlin in his study assimilate him to their school
after the fact. “One spirit moves into the wider circle, not into the
center—a spirit who cannot be comprehended merely in his quality
as a ‘poet’ in the modern sense of the word (however high this
must be reckoned) … this spirit is Hölderlin, and the thesis that
establishes his relationship to the Romantic school is the principle
of the sobriety of art.” See Benjamin Selected Writings 1,
175/Kunstkritik, 97. Benjamin was well ahead of his age in recog-
nizing Hölderlin’s significance not merely as a poet but as a theo-
retical writer who made contributions to the development of
post-Kantian debates, a position that was not widespread in phi-
losophy until the work of Dieter Henrich from the 1970s.
12. Eiland and Jennings ague that in the dissertation Benjamin “intro-
duces three theses central to his later work: the notion that the
creative destruction or, in Schlegel’s terminology, annihilation of
the cultural object is a prerequisite to all critique, the assumption
that all meaningful criticism intends the redemption of the work’s
‘truth content’; and the understanding of the critical work as an
autonomous creation fully commensurate with the ‘original’ work
of art.” Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A
Critical Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 108.
13. The context of this dissertation within Benjamin’s intellectual

development has to be reconsidered along these lines. It is argued
by Menninghaus, and repeated by Rudolph Gasché, that Benjamin
had very limited grasp of the problems of post-Kantian philosophy,
and of the texts of the Romantics, but that he actually ‘got it right’
in some general sense because he was already predisposed to a
Romantic way of thinking because of his notion of language, as
formulated in his 1916 essay ‘On Language’ (See Rudolph Gasché,
‘The Sober Absolute’ in Walter Benjamin and the Romantics, 51.).
But this approach ignores the fact that Benjamin’s views on lan-
guage and mimesis actually changed as a result of his encounter

with the Romantics. This will be illustrated in what follows.
14. An interesting comparable approach to Benjamin’s concept of crit-
icism may be found in Thijs Leijster, ‘The Interruption of Myth:
Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Criticism’ in Karin de Boer, ed.,
Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy
(London: Palgrave, 2012), 156–172. Leijster makes an analogous
point by demonstrating that the dissertation establishes Benjamin’s
commitment to a notion of immanent criticism, while the ‘Critique
of Violence’ essay establishes a commitment to the notion that
critique is violent.
15. Benjamin Selected Writings 1, 177/Kunstkritik, 100. Although
Benjamin develops this thesis on the retreat of the beautiful out of
his reading of the Romantics, it has vital implications for his later
thought, especially in his essay ‘On the Artwork in the Age of its
Technical Reproducibility’, where his famous thesis on the liquida-
tion of aura in modern art involves a critique ‘beautiful semblance’.
See his text ‘The Significance of Beautiful Semblance’ in Benjamin
Selected Writings 3, 137–138. Indeed, this thesis also has vital
implications for Adorno’s conception of modern art in Aesthetic
Theory. See Ross Wilson, ‘Aesthetics’ in Theodor Adorno: Key
Concepts, ed. Deborah Cook, (Stocksfeld: Acumen, 2008), 153.
Wilson gives an account of the impact of Benjamin’s reading of
Schlegel on Adorno.
16. SW 1, 144–146/Kunstkritik, 51–53.
17. Ibid., 149/57.
18. Ibid., 151/58.
19. Rebecca Comay’s interpretation: “Abandoning its traditional legis-
lating and legitimizing role, Romantic criticism instead comes to
realize it as an inexhaustible process of supplementation of the
individual work through repetitive recycling of prior texts.”
Rebecca Comay, ‘Benjamin and the Ambiguities of Romanticism’
in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David Ferris
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 140. This inter-
pretation seems to assimilate Benjamin’s Romantics to the decon-
structive method: it hinges on conflating the method of immanent
reflection with ‘repetition and recycling’ of texts.
20. SW 1, 151–152/Kunstkritik, 58.
21. Ibid., 152/58.
180 N. ROSS
22. Ibid., 177/100.

23. SW 3, 137. In a much later text that he wrote as part of his famous
‘On the Artwork in the Age of Technological Reproducibility’ he
reiterates this thesis on the retreat of the beautiful: “The signifi-
cance of beautiful semblance is rooted in an age of perception that
is now nearing its end.” See also note 22 of the second version of
the ‘Artwork’ essay. While Benjamin and Adorno disagreed about
the direction of modern art, it is safe to say that Benjamin’s thesis
on the retreat of the beautiful had great influence on Adorno: for
a discussion of the centrality of this theme in Adorno’s work see
Jay Bernstein’s ‘The Demand of Ugliness: Picasso’s Bodies’ in Art
and Aesthetics after Adorno, ed. Jay Bernstein (Berkeley: UC Press,
2010), 209.
24. “The progressive reaction (to a work) is characterized by the direct,
intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orien-
tation of the expert.” Benjamin Selected Works 3, 116.
25. “Art is directed toward truth, it is not itself immediate truth; to
this extent truth is its content. By its relation to truth, art is knowl-
edge; art itself knows truth in that truth emerges through it. As
knowledge, however, art is neither discursive nor is its truth the
reflection of an object.” Theodor Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 418.
26. ‘On Language as such and the Language of Man’ in Benjamin
Selected Writings 1, 62–74. He writes that it is the “the bourgeois
conception of language” which considers the words as a means of
communications between humans. To this he opposes another
purpose of language, bound up with the redemption of things:
“God’s creation is complete when things receive their names from
man.” Benjamin Selected Writings 1, 65.
27. SW 4 and also in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–264.
28. See ibid., seventh thesis. Here he writes famously that all products
of culture are also products of barbarism.
29. SW 1, 160/Kunstkritik, 73.
30. “The individual work should be dissolved in the medium of art.”
SW 1, 153/Kunstkritik, 60.
31. Ibid., 158/71.
32. Ibid., 156/70.
33. Hans-Georg Gadamer develops his argument on the ‘subjectiviza-

tion of aesthetics by Kant’ in Truth and Method, Wahrheit und
Methode, Heremeneutik 1 (Tubingen: Mohr, 1990), 48–87. It
seems possible to reconstruct Gadamer’s argument about the sub-
jectivity of Kant’s aesthetics by looking at Benjamin’s work on the
Romantics: if anything, Gadamer’s thesis is enriched by a deeper
knowledge of the aesthetic tradition immediately after Kant.
34. This logic of dissolution, progression, and sublation between art
forms in the Romantic theory places them in a kind of unacknowl-
edged proximity to the aesthetic philosophy of Hegel, who also
thought of all other arts as ‘sublated’ into poetry, and poetry as
sublated into prose. (See Comay, ‘Benjamin and the ambiguities of
Romanticism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin,
142).
35. Benjamin Selected Works 1, 173–174/Kunstkritik, 95–96.
36. Menninghaus argues that Benjamin overemphasizes sobriety and
prose in his reading by pointing to passages in which Schlegel and
Novalis write of the ecstatic nature of the aesthetic. Winfried
Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic
Theory of Reflection’ in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed.
Beatrice Hansen and Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum,
2002), 35–36. This criticism is incorrect because first, it fails to
acknowledge that Benjamin considers Hölderlin, even more than
Schlegel, as the originator of the notion of sobriety, and more
importantly, because its rests on the argument that sobriety is a
concept defined merely in opposition enthusiasm or that prose is
defined merely as the lack of poetry. But the true Romantic argu-
ment is that prose is the truth of poetry not because it negates it
but because it includes it within a medium of reflection.
37. It is on this point that Benjamin assimilates Hölderlin to the

Romantic school: “One spirit moves into the wider circle, not into
the center … the thesis that establishes his relationship to the
Romantic school is the principle of the sobriety of art.” Ibid.,
175/97.
38. Ibid., 153/60.
39. Anthologized as ‘Seven Maxims’ in Freidrich Hölderlin, Essays and
Letters, ed. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin,
2009), 240. The text is referred to as ‘Reflexion’ in German. See
182 N. ROSS
Vol. 14 in Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. D. Sattler

(Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1979).
40. Benjamin could not have known this text at the time: however
there are many poems of Hölderlin that express similar notions
about measure and sobriety, especially ‘Brod und Wein’.
41. SW 3, 122.
42. In section 15 of the second version of the essay, he compares the
progressive reaction of the masses to a Chaplin film to the reaction-
ary attitude that the public demonstrates to avant garde painting.
He writes: “The progressive attitude is characterized by an imme-
diate, intimate fusion of pleasure—pleasure in seeing and experi-
encing—with the orientation of an expert.” SW 3, 116. Here
Benjamin analyzes not merely how some arts, such as film, are
more subject to simultaneous experience by a mass of spectators
but also the way in which ‘expertise’, that is, a knowledge of the
laws of aesthetic creation, can be more of less immanent to the
immediate experience of the work. Photography and film embody
the structure of sobriety in their very form because of the way that
they combine sensuous, immediate experience with a quasi-scien-
tific dissection of the material of daily experience.
43. An interesting account of Benjamin’s multifarious usages of the
concept of mimesis and their influence on Adorno may be found in
Josef Früchtl, Mimesis: Konstellation eines Zentralbegriffs bei
Adorno (Würzburg, 1986), 17–29. This account does well to show
how Benjamin’s notion of ‘non-sensible similarity’ informs his phi-
losophy of language as well his interpretation of Proust. However,
it ignores two key sites of the term mimesis in Benjamin: his essay
‘On the Task of the Translator’ and the second version of his essay
‘On the Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’, in
which he develops his distinction between the two forms of mime-
sis and applies this distinction to art.
44. See Andrew Benjamin, ‘The Absolute as Translatability’ in Walter
Benjamin and Romanticism, 109–122. The essay gives a strong
account of how ‘translatability’ represents a deep metaphysical
problem that shapes Benjamin’s early thinking on language. Yet it
does not really observe the deep contrast between this text and the
later essays ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ and ‘On the Task of the
Translator’. See also Beatrice Hansen, ‘Language and Mimesis in
Benjamin’s Work’, 54–72 in The Cambridge Companion to Walter
Benjamin. It offers a similar insight to my own thesis on Benjamin’s

shift from a critique of bad mimesis to an embracing of mimesis as
a constructive process. However, it attributes this insight to
Benjamin’s fragments from the 1930’s (‘On the Mimetic Faculty’
and ‘On the Doctrine of the Similar’), rather than noting that the
essay from 1921 ‘The Task of Translator’ already contains the key
shift in Benjamin’s thinking. I believe that chronologically this
point is important in Benjamin’s thinking because it suggests the
transformative influence of his work on the Romantic concept of
criticism (completed in 1918).
45. Hansen gives an interesting understanding of the intellectual

motives behind Benjamin’s view of mimesis in this early work:
“Such earlier, covert references to ‘bad’ mimesis may have been
informed by the Jewish prohibition against idolatry as well as the
Platonic critique of Mimesis in The Republic.” Ibid., 66.
46. In the accounts of both Andrew Benjamin and Beatrice Hansen,
the translation essay (1921) is subsumed to the same period of
thought as the language essay (1916), because they argue that the
former already establishes the centrality of translation to his con-
ception of language. However, I will argue that the latter essay
represents a fundamental shift in his thinking, because it views the
multiplicity of human languages as a medium for gaining reflective
truth, rather than a curse. It seems informed by a new evaluation
of art as a means for producing truth.
47. SW 1, 257.
48. Ibid., 261.
49. Ibid., 261.
50. According to Michael Jennings, the key development in Benjamin’s
thinking on language has to do with a new ‘antipathy to nature’.
In the early language essay, “Nature therefore possesses a language,
a means of revealing itself.” Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical
Images: Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1987), 97. While in his later thought, “The spirit-
nature dualism becomes increasingly explicit in Benjamin’s thought
on language.” Ibid., 105.
51. SW 2.2, 721. My translation.
52. Benjamin, SW 2.2, 722.
53. Früchtl demonstrates how the production of such affinities depends
upon a fortuitous moment. Früchtl, Mimesis, 24.
184 N. ROSS
54. As I noted in the prior chapter, this interpretation of the Romantics

as offering a crucial impetus to Benjamin’s thinking stands in con-
trast to a predominant approach. Menninghaus establishes the
view that there is an ‘inner affinity’ between Benjamin’s earlier phi-
losophy of language (from before the dissertation) and the phi-
losophy of German Romanticism. See Winfried Menninghaus,
‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic Theory of
Reflection’ in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice
Hansen and Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2002).
What if it is not far more the case that his encounter with the
Romantics leads him to abandon his earlier view of mimesis and
translation?
55. Ibid., 258.
56. SW 1, 389. An almost identical formulation appears in the

Trauerspiel text: “Mortification of the works: not then—as the
Romantics have it—awakening of the consciousness in living
works, but the settling of consciousness in dead ones.” Origin,
182.
57. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s-abilities (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010).
58. Origin, 178.
59. Origin, 182. Emphasis mine.
60. Ibid., 334.
61. “It is not possible to conceive of a starker contrast to the artistic
symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic totality, than this
amorphous fragment, which is seen in the form of allegorical script.
In it, the Baroque reveals itself to be the sovereign opposite of clas-
sism, as which only Romanticism has hitherto been acknowledged.
And we should not resist finding the features which are common
to both of them.” Benjamin, Origin, 176.
62. Benjamin, SW 2.2, 721.
63. “The question is whether we are concerned with the decay of this
faculty or with its transformation.” Benjamin, SW 2.2, 721.
64. From ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov’
in Benjamin, SW 3, 143. The text is recycled from Experience and
Poverty, Benjamin, SW 2.2, 731.
65. Eiland and Jennings, A Critical Life, 182.
66. At the start of the ‘Artwork’ essay he writes: “When Marx under-
took his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, that mode
was in its infancy … Since the transformation of the superstructure

proceeds far more slowly than that of the base, it has taken more
than a half a century for the change in the condition of production
to be manifested in all areas of culture. How this process has
affected culture can only now be assessed.” SW 3, 101.
67. SW 1, 288.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 289.
70. Ibid., 289.
71. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. EFN Jephcott (London:
Verso, 2005), 247 (Section 153).
72. SW 4 and also in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–264.
73. Ibid., 289.
74. For an alternate approach to this piece, see Uwe Steiner, ‘Die
Grenzen des Kapitalismus. Kapitalismus, Religion und Politik in
Benjamins Fragment ‘Kapitalismus als Religion” in: Dirk Baecker
(ed.), Kapitalismus als Religion (Berlin: Kadmos, 2003), 35–59.
Steiner argues that the point of critiquing capitalism as a religion is
to set up an implicit boundary between religious and political
forms of consciousness, with political consciousness being focused
on the problem of earthly happiness. It seems, however, that this
approach does not attend to the way in which Benjamin critiques
capitalism as a particularly problematic form of religion. The point
is not to take us out of religious consciousness but instead to show
that capitalism is embedded in the needs and problems of religious
consciousness in a way that is particularly unreflective.
75. SW 2.2, 799.
76. Ibid., 498.
77. SW 2.2, 496–497.
78. Ibid., 451.
79. Ibid., 453.
80. Ibid., 453–454.
81. Ibid., 454.
82. For example, Kai Hammermeister writes of Benjamin’s thesis on
the decline of aura in this essay: “Benjamin merely proclaims a fact
and abstains from argument.” Kai Hammermeister, The German
Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 199. This critique of Benjamin only holds if we fail to note
186 N. ROSS
Benjamin’s arguments on the dialectical opposition of the two

forms of mimesis and their relation to the two modes of technol-
ogy, which structure Benjamin’s argument but mostly disappear
from his later version of the essay.
83. SW 3, 104.
84. This view of Benjamin’s antipathy to nature has taken root in a
variety of ways: see, for example, Jennings, Dialectical Images,
105. It is argued in a variety of ways that Benjamin’s increasing
emphasis on artifice and technology stems from his belief in a kind
of deep danger within nature. I hope to show in this essay that
Benjamin’s thinking on aesthetics and technology is deeply consis-
tent with an ecological way of thinking: what is at stake is not so
much a valorization of the technical over the natural, as an adjust-
ment of technology so that it establishes a deep balance humans
and nature.
85. I believe the tendency of interpreters to underestimate the philo-
sophical richness of Benjamin’s later media theory stems from reli-
ance on the third version of the essay. My interpretation focuses on
the second version of the essay (from 1935) rather than the final
version of the essay. This version, along with some manuscript
materials from the same year, contains reflections on the theory of
aesthetic beauty in German idealism, the altered form of mimesis
in new arts, as well as the crucial distinction between the ‘first’ and
‘second’ technologies that are omitted from the final version. Each
of these omitted reflections allows the reader to establish a clearer
connection to Benjamin’s earlier work on the notion of aesthetic
experience. See especially section six of the essay, notes 22 and 31,
as well as the manuscript fragments ‘A Different Utopian Will’,
‘The Significance of Beautiful Semblance’, ‘Theory of Distraction’.
86. For an account of the origin of this distinction in Benjamin’s

thought, see Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his
Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010),
14.
87. SW 3, 105.
88. Adorno comments on this passage, noting that Benjamin’s formu-
lation of the concept of aura rests on a particular way of e xperiencing
nature: “This (Benjaminian notion of aura) is thus actually a natu-
ral phenomenon, that is, the peculiar character of the farness of
what is most near.” This comment occurs in a lecture in which
Adorno emphasizes the need for aesthetic philosophy to take seri-

ously the problem of nature aesthetics: see Theodor W. Adorno,
Ästhetik (1958/59) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 45.
89. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno calls into question the central strategy
of Benjamin’s late aesthetics, the distinctions between semblance
and play: “The crisis of semblance (Schein) may engulf play as well,
for the harmlessness of play deserves the same fate as harmony,
which originates from semblance. Art that seeks to redeem itself
from semblance through play becomes sport.” Theodor W. Adorno,
Aesthetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 154. In English
see Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-
Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 100.
However, as the next section will argue, this critique of Benjamin
is grounded in Adorno’s own employment of Benjamin’s insights
about the productive quality of mimesis and the ‘crisis of mimesis’
discussed above.
90. For a deeper grasp of this problem, see Stéphane Symons, ‘The
Ability to Not Shine’ in Angelaki, Vol. 8, no. 4. He argues that
Benjamin’s use of the term unscheinbar in a variety of works refers
to an elusive kind of meaning concealed in phenomena that elude
appearance. Thus the lack of conspicuous appearance is not merely
a privation but also a vital spark of truth that has been uncovered
by a kind of negative ability to attend to seemingly insignificant
things.
91. Often cited by Benjamin. For example, SW 3, 137.
92. As my chapter on Schiller argues, the concepts of Schein and Spiel
are not dialectically opposed in his thought. Rather, Schilller shows
that it is precisely the playful attitude of artistic creation which
makes its ‘semblance’ not an epistemic error (illusion) but a mode
of aesthetic truth. One might say that for Schiller, an appearance is
‘beautiful’ (schöner Schein) rather than deceptive to just the extent
that it is playful. Thus the ability to engage with semblance as sem-
blance represents the key, for Schiller, to engaging with objects in
a way that does not reduce them to objects of use or conceptual
reduction.
93. SW 3, 127.
94. SW 3, 127.
95. SW 3, 127.
96. SW 3, 107–108.
188 N. ROSS
7. SW 3, 107.
9
98. SW 3, 109.
99. I thus see continuity between his treatment of the Romantic

medium of reflection as an infinite and fragmentary process and his
view of film as an inherently provisional art. Contrast this to
Jennings, who emphasizes the discontinuity in Benjamin’s thought:
“In contrast to his earliest, neo-Romantic theories, the work of art
in the 1930’s is the home not of an almost integrated truth, but of
historical truths, shards of pure, historical experience.” Michael
Jennings, Dialectical Images, 146.
100. SW 3, 112.
101. There is something analogous to this in Benjamin’s philosophy of
photography: the way that a photograph can include some detail
unintended by the photographer that comes to have a great signifi-
cance for the audience because of later events. A picture of a person
who commits suicide, for example, will possibly suggest to the later
viewer the course of events that caused the suicide. For a discussion
of this aspect of Benjamin’s philosophy of photography, see
Symons, 111. Symons interprets this aspect in terms of his thesis
on Unscheinbarkeit, but in light of my discussion we could con-
sider it as the incursion of nature, or the give and take of human
life with nature, into art.
102. SW 3, 112.
103. Ibid., 119.
104. See section XIII in third version of essay or section XVI in second
version, Ibid., 117–118.
105. SW 3, 117 and 119.
106. SW 3, 117.
107. “The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film
industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell
of the personality’ the phony spell of commodity. So long as the
movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolu-
tionary merit can be accredited to today’s films than the promo-
tion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art.”
Ibid., 113. What replaces aura, is in most cases something even
worse: the commodified art form, in which ‘personality’, the spuri-
ous interest in the life of the individual, takes the place of the artists
craft.
108. I find that Adorno’s critique of Benjamin’s essay fails to capture

this dialectical distinction. He finds that Benjamin’s optimism
about new arts, sports, cartoons, and so on as progressive modes of
experience fails to see how they merely reinforce the ideology of
capitalism by appealing to the laziness and overstimulation of the
spectators. Yet it is clear that Benjamin merely diagnoses a negative
necessity and a positive potential in the new arts, while noting that
this positive potential mostly remains unrealized in new arts.
109. Compare Georg Bertram, ‘Benjamin and Adorno on Art as Critical
Practice’ in Nathan Ross, Ed. The Aesthetic Ground of Critical
Theory (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
110. The early critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer has generally
been considered more in the context of ‘ecological’ approaches to
nature than Benjamin’s thought, which has sometimes even been
charged with ‘antipathy to nature’. I hope that this interpretation
will make clear the important, latent role of nature in Benjamin’s
materialist aesthetics. It is not so much that Benjamin affirms the
value of technology as that he questions the way in which different
modes of technology guide our relation to nature.
111. It is worth noting that Benjamin attributes the notion of sem-
blance more to Goethe’s experience of nature and Hegel’s aesthet-
ics than to Schiller’s philosophy of art. This is ironic because it is
precisely Schiller who places this concept in relation to the notion
of play.
112. Benjamin’s influence on Adorno’s aesthetics can be felt in his copi-
ous reference to concepts such as mimesis, aura, Schein, and Spiel
in some of the densest, most theoretical passages in Aesthetic
Theory. Adorno is, in essence, struggling to articulate a slightly dif-
ferent take on the problem of mimesis than Benjamin. The prox-
imity of the two thinkers is even more apparent in Adorno’s
lectures on aesthetics from 1958/59. In the opening lectures, he
devotes extensive attention to this constellation of concepts that he
inherits from Benjamin. See Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetik
(1958/59) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 44–45 and 72–79.
113. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes: “The crisis of semblance
(Schein) may engulf play as well, for the harmlessness of play
deserves the same fate as harmony, which originates from sem-
blance. Art that seeks to redeem itself from semblance through
play becomes sport.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie
190 N. ROSS
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 154. In English see Theodor

W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 100.
However, as the next section will argue, this critique of Benjamin
is grounded in Adorno’s own employment of Benjamin’s insights
about the productive quality of mimesis and the ‘crisis of mimesis’
discussed above.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1983. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
———. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2003. Aesthetische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
———. 2009. Ästhetik (1958/59). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken.
———. 1996. Selected Writings—Volume 1: 1913-1926 (SW1). Ed. Howard Eiland
and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1999a. Selected Writings—Volume 2.1: 1927-1930 (SW 2.1). Ed. Howard
Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1999b. Selected Writings—Volume 2.2: 1931-1934 (SW 2.2). Ed. Howard
———. 2002. Selected Writings—Volume 3: 1935-1938 (SW 3). Ed. Howard
———. 2003a. Selected Writings—Volume 4: 1938-1940 (SW 4). Trans. Edmund
Jephcott, et al. ed., Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
———. 2003b. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne.
London: Verso.
Bernstein, Jay. 2010. The Demand of Ugliness: Picasso’s Bodies. In Art and
Aesthetics after Adorno, ed. Jay Bernstein, 210–248. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Bertram, Georg. 2015. Benjamin and Adorno on Art as Critical Practice. In The
Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory, ed. Nathan Ross. London: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Comay, Rebecca. 2004. Benjamin and the Ambiguities of Romanticism. In The
Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David Ferris. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
de Boer, Karin, ed. 2012. Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary
Philosophy. London: Palgrave.
Eiland, Howard, and Micheal Jennings. 2014. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Früchtl, Josef. 1986. Mimesis: Konstellation eines Zentralbegriffs bei Adorno.
Würzburg.
Gadamer, Hans Georg. 1990. Wahrheit und Methode, Heremeneutik 1. Tubingen:
Mohr.
Hammermeister, Kai. 2002. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hansen, Beatrice, and Andrew Benjamin. eds. 2002. Walter Benjamin and
Romanticism. London: Continuum. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996).
Hölderlin, Freidrich. 1979. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. D. Sattler Frankfurt: Roter Stern.
———. 2009. Essays and Letters. Ed. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. London:
Penguin.
Jennings, Michael W. 1987. Dialectical Images: Benjamin’s Theory of Literary
Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Steiner, Uwe. 2003. Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus. Kapitalismus, Religion und
Politik in Benjamins Fragment ‘Kapitalismus als Religion. In Kapitalismus als
Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker. Berlin: Kadmos.
———. 2010. Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Symons, Stéphane. 2013. The Ability to Not Shine. Angelaki 13(4), 101–123.
Weber, Samuel. 2010. Benjamin’s-Abilities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Cook. Stocksfeld: Acumen.

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CHAPTER 5

Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of Critical

Critical is something that one cannot be enough. (Friedrich Schlegel,

Walter Benjamin’s writings have a unique power to inspire new ways of

© The Author(s) 2017 131

There is arguably no concept or problem that stands more at the

experience of art as ‘semblance’ in order to liberate its potential as play.

1 Critique as Redemptive Knowledge in Early

With this the basic principle of Romantic object-knowledge is given: that

In the Romantic theory of knowledge, an object is only known insofar

nature as a system of relations, have their own self-awareness, it should

While there is a Romantic side even to Kant’s aesthetic theory, in that

delimiting such a field of experience. Benjamin sees in the Romantics a

works of art as products of human enjoyment but that knows them as

of reflection”.31 And: “Form is the objective expression of the reflec-

One of Benjamin’s greatest and most original contributions to the inter-

There are degrees of enthusiasm. Beginning with merriness, which is prob-

We see that Hölderlin defines sobriety not as a lack of enthusiasm

aesthetic experience as not merely a matter of aesthetic theory, or of the

2 Mimesis and the Genesis of Critical Experience

‘non-sensible similarities’, a unique ability to enter into a relation with

meant”.51 Here we see Benjamin using the notion of non-sensible simi-

of language within literature that separates his conception of ‘The Task

criticism is the mortification of the works. Not the intensification of con-

mentary in the work so as to enable a process of endless reflection on

The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic

lute, as in one understanding of Romanticism, but instead provides frag-

It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our

ism in crisis, failed democracy, and technological warfare do not allow us

3 Benjamin’s Critique of Capitalism

that conceals itself as a relation between things, becomes a key element in

system of organizing people and reproducing itself, a form of religion.

Here it is necessary to consider the debt not merely as a subjective

that motivates production in capitalism is not a relation of debt between

The paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently formulated by

literary critic: Franz Kafka. Benjamin challenged the first generation of

The reflections to which (Kafka’s writings) give rise are interminable …

This passage offers both a remarkably positive interpretation of one of the

as redeeming an object from its instrumental context by treating it as a

This passage relates the experience of inflation to a central theme in

prior property rested. Inflation really represents an alienated form of prog-

Benjamin argues that the forced preoccupation with cost of living

At its root, Benjamin’s exploration of the phenomenon of inflation is

4 The Disillusioning of Mimesis in Film

As I have argued, what is truly distinctive in Benjamin’s critique of capi-

developing an analysis of the transformation that apperception undergoes

involves a deep balance founded on openness and reciprocity between

distinctively mimetic mode of comportment that would allow us to gain

essay.90 Benjamin cites Goethe as giving the most adequate articulation

Thus we encounter the polarity informing mimesis. In mimesis, tightly

We have to believe, in a pre-reflective way, in a need for distance between

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of famil-

Benjamin ties this revealing of an optical unconscious to the cause of lib-

The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between

our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and

content, and of thinking aesthetic experience as a way to challenge and

between Adorno and Benjamin can gain greater clarity. Ironically, it is at

of mimesis). In other words, in his early thought he both devises a positive

5. See especially ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’,

an interpretation of this kind may have to stretch the meaning of

guage and mimesis actually changed as a result of his encounter

22. Ibid., 177/100.

33. Hans-Georg Gadamer develops his argument on the ‘subjectiviza-

108. I find that Adorno’s critique of Benjamin’s essay fails to capture