“Another Nature Which Speaks to the Camera”: Film and Translation

in the Writings of Walter Benjamin

Gold, Joshua Robert, 1971-

MLN, Volume 122, Number 3, April 2007 (German Issue), pp.

602-622 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mln.2007.0062

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 “Another Nature Which Speaks to
the Camera”: Film and Translation
in the Writings of Walter Benjamin
❦

Joshua Robert Gold

“The phenomenon of déjà vu has often been

described. Is the term really apt? Shouldn’t
we rather speak of events which affect us
like an echo—one awakened by a sound that
seems to have issued from somewhere in the
darkness of past life?”
Walter Benjamin,
Berlin Childhood around 1900

I
What would it mean to read Walter Benjamin’s theory of film in
conjunction with his writings on language? If upon first glance this
question appears unusual, even extravagant, it is because one typically
associates film with the visual realm—all theoretical investigations into
film sound notwithstanding. Nor does it help matters that scholarship
has inadvertently obscured certain continuities running throughout
Benjamin’s works by separating them into an early “theological” period
and a later “Marxist” one. Finally, there is also a sense in which a con-
siderable obstruction to reconsidering Benjamin’s theory of film comes
from Benjamin himself—specifically from his tendency to invoke the
language of pictures, images, and vision (“profane illumination,” “dia-
lectical image,” and so on).1 Yet his writings on film and photography,

1
 Samuel Weber exemplifies commentators’ longstanding preoccupation with this
aspect of Benjamin’s writings when he notes that “a certain pictoriality or figurality

MLN 122 (2007): 602–622 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
 M L N 603

far from breaking with his early works, actually elaborate his initial
preoccupations with speech and language; indeed, he arrives at the
conclusions in the way that he does as a result of his attempt to think
through the implications of these youthful theoretical reflections.
Here some degree of caution is required, since readers searching for
evidence of the convergence between language and film in Benjamin’s
writings will come away disappointed if they limit their investigation
to the more predictable places. For example, Benjamin pays scant
attention to the phenomenon of film sound, and what few comments
he ventures to offer on this topic in “The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–36) are so implausible as
to border on the bizarre (such as his claim that there is a direct cor-
relation between the advent of sound film and the rise of fascism).2
In fact, the intersection between language and film in his writings
must be sought at those moments that describe the significance of
modern visual technologies in terms of their capacity to vocalize the
extremities of modern experience, thereby rendering audible (and
hence intelligible) what would otherwise remain mute. From this per-
spective, the revolutionary potential of film and photography does not
have to do with how they show the world as such, but with the way in
which this showing constitutes a form of speech. Therein consists the
truly innovative character of Benjamin’s reading, which only becomes

(Bildlichkeit) distinguishes Benjamin’s own style of writing and thinking from the very
first.” See “Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the work of Walter Benjamin,”
in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1996) 27.
2
 “The simultaneity of these two phenomena results from the economic crisis. The
same disorders which led, in the world at large, to an attempt to maintain existing
property relations by brute force induced film capital, under the threat of crisis, to
speed up the development of sound film. Its introduction brought temporary relief,
not only because sound film attracted the masses back into the cinema but also because
it consolidated new capital from the electricity industry with that of film” (SW 3, 123;
VII.1, 357). In the following pages, references to the English translation and German
originals will be given in the body of the text. SW 1 = Walter Benjamin, Selected Writ-
ings: Volume 1 (1913–1926), eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge
and London: Harvard UP, 1996); SW 2 = Selected Writrings: Volume 2 (1927–1934), trans.
Rodney Livingstone and others, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary
Smith (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2002); SW 3 = Selected Writings: Volume 3
(1935–1938), trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others, eds. Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2002); SW 4 = Selected
Writings: Volume 4 (1938–1940), trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, eds. Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2003). Additional nu-
merals refer to the volume and page number of Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften,
eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1974).
604 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

apparent after having taken note of how his analysis draws upon a
repository of acoustic motifs that are already discernable in earlier,
more programmatic essays.3
Taking as their point of departure Benjamin’s claim that “it is
another nature that speaks to the camera as compared to the eye,”
the following pages elaborate the affinities between his analysis of
film in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-
ibility” and his account of language in “On Language as Such and on
the Language of Man” (1916). In doing so it will become apparent
that Benjamin’s theory of film owes a great deal to his early account
regarding the ability of the human language of names to enable the
non-human, inanimate world to express itself. This is not to claim
that his vocabulary never undergoes any modification during the
twenty years that intervene between his essay on language and his
essay on film; quite the contrary. Although he initially has recourse
to the notion of speechlessness in order to characterize the Fall of
Creation, Benjamin subsequently comes to understand this condition
as the deleterious effect of modern civilization upon the integrity of
tradition. Speechlessness, in other words, becomes symptomatic of
the modern regime of shock rather than mythic nature. Despite such
differences, however, the present argument also demonstrates the
striking (if implicit) resemblance between the medium of film and the
activity of translation in Benjamin’s writings. In addition to enabling
speech where there was once speechlessness, film and translation are
processes that dislocate an original text.4 After having touched upon

3
 To the best of my knowledge, the only other commentator to have considered
relationship of language to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-
ibility” is Alexander García Düttmann, who asks what Benjamin means when he claims
to offer concepts that are “completely unusable for the purposes of Fascism.” Readers
are directed to Düttmann’s provocative article “Tradition and Destruction: Walter
Benjamin’s Politics of Language,” trans. Debbie Keates, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy:
Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and
New York: Routledge, 1994) 32–58. They are also encouraged to consider Eva Geulen’s
“Zeit zur Darstellung: Walter Benjamins Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit,” which examines the stylistic complexities of Benjamin’s essay. See
MLN 107 (1992): 580–605.
4
 From this perspective, this article follows recent interest in Benjamin’s theory of
translation. See Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin, ed. Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig (Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001). Two contributions in particular deserve mention for exam-
ining the importance of auditory motifs in “The Task of the Translator”: Rainer Nägele,
“Echolalie” (17–37), and Bettine Menke, “‘Wie man in den Wald hineinruft, . . .’ Echos
der Übersetzung” (367–93). Readers are also encouraged to consult the third chapter of
Gerhard Richter’s work Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 2000). Entitled “Benjamin’s Ear: Noise, Mnemonics, and the Berlin Chronicle,”
 M L N 605

these matters, this investigation will conclude with a brief consideration

of how Benjamin’s persistent concern with articulation and muteness
can help us better understand the well-known famous conclusion of
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”
which opposes the fascist “aestheticization of politics” with the “politi-
cizing of art” promised by communism.

II
The sixteenth section of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technologi-
cal Reproducibility” elaborates the description that Benjamin offered
in section fourteen regarding the revolutionary impact of film upon
human perception. There he put forth the now well-known contrast
between the magician and the surgeon: “Magician is to surgeon as
painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a
natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates
deeply into its tissue. The images obtained by each differ enormously.
The painter’s is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer
is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new
law” (SW 3, 116; VII.1, 374). Emphasizing the way in which the camera
undermines the experience of distance that was crucial to the aura
of the traditional artwork, these lines are consistent with Benjamin’s
preoccupation throughout this work with the emphasis on proximity in
mass culture.5 This being the case, his subsequent remarks in section
sixteen hardly come as a surprise: “Our bars and city streets, our offices
and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to
close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-
world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off
calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris” (SW 3, 117;
VII.1, 376). The reference here to dynamite is not without significance:
it evokes the power of film to fragment, break down, penetrate. What
it reveals in so doing, according to Benjamin, are aspects of the world

it foregrounds the motif of hearing and sound in Benjamin’s writings through a close
reading of this autobiographical text. Rather than investigate the relationship of sound
to translation, Richter reads certain acoustic figures in conjunction with Benjamin’s
concerns with technology—in particular the telephone. See Richter 163–97.
5
 Conversely, as both Samuel Weber and Rodolphe Gasché have noted, the aura of
the artwork for Benjamin can be understood as a manifestation or materialization
of distance. See Weber 35–36 and Gasché, “Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian
Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’”
Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy 189.
606 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

that would otherwise remain inaccessible to a perception left unaided

by this phenomenological prosthesis. As he writes: “Clearly it is another
nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye [eine andere
Natur . . . die zu der Kamera, als die zum Auge spricht]. ‘Other’ above all in
the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a
space informed by the unconscious” (SW 3, 117; VII.1, 376).
This last comment, despite its familiarity to every reader of “The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” is no
less striking owing to its unconventional vocabulary. After all, what
is this “other nature,” and what does it mean for it to “speak” to
the camera? Admittedly, this reference to another nature that film
discloses becomes comprehensible when read in conjunction with
Benjamin’s elaboration of the seemingly esoteric formulation “the
optical unconscious.” Thus, while “we have some idea what is involved
in the act of walking” and “are familiar with the movement of picking
up a cigarette lighter or a spoon,” we still “have no idea at all what
happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step”
or “what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how
this varies with different moods.” He concludes:
This is where the camera comes into play, with alls its resources for swooping
and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence,
enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first dis-
cover the optical unconscious [das Optisch-Unbewußte], just as we discover
the instinctual unconscious [das Triebhaft-Unbewußte] through psychoanalysis.
(SW 3, 117; VII.1, 376)

According to these remarks, the “optical unconscious” designates those

interstitial perceptual regions which, having hitherto evaded the notice
of the human eye, reveal themselves to the recording techniques of
modern visual technologies, similar to the way that the psychic uncon-
scious reveals itself to the interpretive techniques of psychoanalysis.
Understood in this manner, the optical unconscious can easily be
assimilated to the “other nature” that Benjamin also mentions, both
phrases being different names for the same historical process.6 No,
what remains problematic is the claim that this nature “speaks to the

6
 Miriam Hansen has astutely noted the ambiguities of Benjamin’s term: “Like his
remarks on film throughout the Artwork Essay, Benjamin’s elaboration of the ‘optical
unconscious’ oscillates between a description of technical innovations and their emanci-
pative possibilities, between historical analysis and a utopian discourse of redemption.”
See “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’”
New German Critique 40 (1987): 210.
 M L N 607

camera as compared to the eye”—a matter that becomes even more

confusing owing to the implicit association of this nature with an opti-
cal unconscious rather than, say, an audible or acoustic one. In her
influential reading of the artwork essay, Miriam Hansen claims that
Benjamin is describing the capacity of film “to lend a physiognomic
expression to objects, to make [the] second nature” of the social
world reciprocate the human gaze, “similar to auratic experience in
phenomena of the first.”7 A suggestive comment, not least because it
draws upon Benjamin’s theory of mimesis—yet it leaves untouched this
allusion to speech. As is so often the case with his writings, these lines
recall a passage from another text—in this instance, “Little History of
Photography” (1931)—although this version, having been subsequently
“reproduced” in the artwork essay, offers little to explain how nature
speaks: “For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather
than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed
by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the uncon-
scious” (SW 2, 510; II.1, 371). In short, Benjamin’s contention that
photographic techniques are capable of uncovering hitherto unfamiliar
aspects of our quotidian surroundings is clear enough from the context
of both essays; what remain less apparent are the implications of his
move from a visual field to a sonic one.
This reference to another nature that speaks begins to make sense
when read in conjunction with Benjamin’s programmatic essay “On
Language as Such and On the Language of Man.” Although it has
until recently received less attention from critics than “The Task
of the Translator” (1921), this text is central to Benjamin’s entire
critical undertaking, not least because it attempts to elaborate a non-
­instrumental conception of language.8 Rather than reduce language
to its capacity for conveying specific verbal contents, “On Language
as Such and On the Language of Man” examines how the language
of each phenomenon, be it animate or inanimate, strives to commu-
nicate (mitteilen) through its own language (Sprache) what Benjamin
calls an intellectual essence or content (geistiges Wesen, geistiger Inhalt):
“There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that

7
 Hansen 210.
8
 Winfried Menninghaus notes that the question guiding Benjamin’s essay can be
understood as the following: “Wie ist der Begriff einer ‘Sprache’ zu verstehen, die
‘unmittelbar nichts zu tun hat’ mit den primären Daten des Sprechens, die man
vielmehr als eine ‘Sprache der Sprache’ bezeichnen kann (wobei ‘der Genitiv nicht
das Verhältnis des Mittels, sondern des Mediums bezeichnet’)?” See Walter Benjamins
Theorie der Sprachmagie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980) 10.
608 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of

each one to communicate its mental contents [geistiger Inhalt]” (SW 1,
62; II.1, 141).9 From this perspective, his understanding of language
is not limited to the everyday meaning of this term, which is to say
that he does not conflate it with words; rather, “language” designates
something more fundamental: in the words of Peter Fenves, who likens
the place of language in Benjamin’s essay to the intuition of space in
Kantian epistemology, it is the “experience, not of objects, but of the
modes of their disclosure.”10
Of course, this is not to deny that Benjamin accords human lan-
guage a privileged place in his account. This is indeed the case, for
“[l]anguage itself is not perfectly expressed in things themselves” inas-
much as “the languages of things are imperfect, and they are dumb.
Things are denied the pure formal principle of language—namely,
sound. They can communicate to one another only through a more
or less material community.” In contrast to this mute language, human
language establishes a “magical community with things” that is “imma-
terial and purely mental, and the symbol of this is sound” (SW 1 67;
II.1, 147). This difference between the audible and the inaudible
is not the only reason for the unique place of human language; in
addition, notes Benjamin, its distinct position has to do with how “the
language of man speaks in words. Man therefore communicates his
own mental being insofar as it is communicable by naming [benennen]
all other things” (SW 1, 64; II.1, 143). Turning to the first chapter of
Genesis—an exercise, we are reminded, whose purpose is “the discov-
ery of what emerges of itself from the biblical text with regard to the
nature of language” (SW 1, 67; II.1, 147)—Benjamin notes how, in the
second story of the Creation, God does not create man through the

9
 Here it is crucial not to be misled by the expression “intellectual content,” which does
not designate the specific “essence” or meaning belonging to a given entity as much as
it does its very capacity for communication. As Rodolphe Gasché observes: “Although this
content is communicated in language, it does not coincide with the linguistic medium in
which it is expressed. It is something quite different from that medium.” He goes on to
conclude: “The mental content distinct from the linguistic entity in which it is communi-
cated is thus communicability itself. In itself, that is, as an expressive medium, language
communicates communicability.” See “Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference:
Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language,” Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings
of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988) 87.
10
 Peter Fenves, “Genesis of Judgement: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphor in Benja-
min’s ‘On Language as Such and on Human Language,’” Walter Benjamin: Theoretical
Questions 83. For an extended treatment on how Benjamin’s early theory of language
critically modifies and transforms Kantian epistemology, see Werner Hamacher, “Inten-
sive Sprachen,” Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin 174–235 (in particular 191–99).
 M L N 609

word (“God spoke—and there was”). Unlike all other beings, “this
man, who is not created from the word, is now invested with the gift
of language and is elevated above nature” (SW 1, 67–68; II.1, 147).
This language, continues Benjamin, the language of names, possesses
a creative power according to the account of Creation presented in
Genesis, which describes how God brought forth nature according to
a threefold act: “Let there be—He made (created)—he named” (SW 1,
68; II.1, 148). Consequently, in granting humanity language, God
grants it the power of names that it may know things: “Only through
the linguistic being of things [das sprachliche Wesen der Dinge] can he
[i.e., man] get beyond himself and attain knowledge [Erkenntnis] of
them—in the name. God’s Creation is completed when things receive
their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks”
(SW 1, 65; II.1, 144). Or as Benjamin notes:
God did not create man from the word, and he did not name him. He did
not wish to subject him to language, but in man God set language, which
had served him as a medium of creation, free. God rested when he had
left his creative power to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine
actuality, became knowledge. Man is the knower in the same language in
which God is the creator. God created him in his image; he created the
knower in the image of the creator. (SW 1, 68; II.1, 149)

Hence the progression of terms underlying the argument of “On

Language as Such and on the Language of Man”: among those lan-
guages within the order of Creation, the human language of words is
the highest, while the decisive element within this language is that
of the name. However, the crucial point here is that names provide
humanity with knowledge of things by rendering them audible: it is
precisely in this regard that naming rectifies the imperfect, mute lan-
guage of things, and that Benjamin can claim that “God’s Creation is
completed when things receive their name from man.”11 Invoking a
model of language that eschews the intentionality of meaning, he goes
on to note that “in name appears the essential law [Wesensgesetz] of
language, according to which to express oneself [sich selbst aussprechen]
and to address [ansprechen] everything else amounts to the same thing.

11
 Menninghaus is correct to relate this motif of articulation to the concept of revela-
tion. As he writes of “Benjamins Aktualisierung der mystisch-theologischen Bestimmung
der Sprache als Offenbarung”: “das Sich-Zeigen von etwas Unausprechlichem—eben:
‘Offenbarung’—ist in ihr nicht länger exklusives Zeugnis des Göttlichen, sondern eine
Audsrucksqualität allen Sprechens.” See Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie 22. See
also 22–32 for Menninghaus’s account of the role of this term in writings of Georg
Hamann and the Early Romantics.
610 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

Language, and in it a mental entity in it, only expresses itself purely

where it speaks in name—that is, in its universal naming” (SW 1, 65;
II.1, 145). The function of names in Benjamin’s account therefore
resembles that of stereo speakers that allow the music from a record
to be heard, although what is at stake in “On Language as Such and
On the Language of Man” is no earthly music but the very language
of Creation itself, as well as the prospect of knowing the beings that
partake in this speech.12
These references to spoken language in “On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man” introduce a motif that will persist in
Benjamin’s writings for years to come. Indeed, so important are these
figures that one can describe his critical undertaking as an attempt to
articulate what might otherwise remain silent, which is to say that his
work attempts to bring certain phenomena to speech. From this perspec-
tive, there exists a clear affinity between philosophy and naming.13
However, this does not mean that he regards silence in purely negative
terms, as the mere absence of speech, sound, voice, or communication.
No: silence itself speaks for Benjamin, which is to say that, inasmuch
as it is intelligible, interpretable (for this is precisely what the essay
on language suggests) silence possesses its own language as much as
any other phenomenon would. In this regard, the task of philosophy
consists in listening to and communicating not simply the language
of this or that artifact, but the silence that has fallen over them dur-
ing the course of time.
Nonetheless, by the time that Benjamin composes “The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”—and this brings us
back to our point of departure—it appears that he has found other
activities (or rather, technologies) capable of fulfilling the same func-
tion that he had once reserved for the domain of philosophy alone.
“Clearly it is another nature that speaks to the camera as compared

12
 Here it is important to note that, like the term “intellectual content,” “knowledge”
does not refer to specific information that the language of things somehow conveys;
rather, the knowledge that is acquired by hearing this language is precisely knowledge
of this speech as the communication of communicability. To cite Michael Bröcker: “die
im Namen erkennbare Wahrheit bildet keinen Sachverhalt—das ist der entscheidende
Sinn der Benjaminischen Namenstheorie. Sie stellt dem menschlichen Erkennen die
Aufgabe, die Dinge in ihrem intentionslosen Sein zu begreifen. Dies geschieht im
erkennenden Nachvollzug des göttlichen Aussprechens, das ein Nennen, aber kein
Reden ist.” See “Sprache,” Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 2, eds. Michael Opitz and Erdmut
Wizisla (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000) 745.
13
 Gasché draws a similar point in his discussion of Benjamin’s concern with emancipat-
ing language “from its natural and mythical interconnectedness and weblike qualities.”
See “Saturnine Visions” 94.
 M L N 611

to the eye”: here at last, the meaning behind Benjamin’s statement

regarding the speaking of nature starts to become apparent insofar as
there is a striking terminological consistency between “On Language
as Such and on the Language of Man” and “The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” However, twenty years after
his reflections on language, it is film, not names, that articulates
the speech of nature—“another nature,” to be sure, not that of the
Creation, but “[o]ur bars and city streets, our offices and furnished
rooms, our railroad stations and factories.” Such differences notwith-
standing, what is at stake in the “The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility” remains much the same as before: the
prospect of emancipating a way of speaking from the world that might
otherwise escape a comportment grounded upon the split between
subject and object.14 In the context of this account, the revolutionary
potential of film and photography to transform human perception
consists in the way that they articulate, rather than disclose, our physi-
cal surroundings—or rather, it consists in the way that this form of
disclosure simultaneously constitutes a mode of articulation.

III
Yet Benjamin does not transpose these acoustic figures from one text
to the other directly: between “On Language as Such and on the Lan-
guage of Man” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” the motif of speech undergoes some crucial modi-
fications. Although we have noted an ongoing preoccupation in his
works with articulating that which is mute (indeed, with articulating the
inarticulate itself ), the terms that the artwork essay draws upon in order
to describe the condition of speechlessness depart from Benjamin’s
earlier account. For the essay on language reads the silence of the
inanimate world in conjunction with the Fall of Creation, whence
Benjamin claims the feeling of mourning as the proper expression of
this state. (“Because she is mute, nature mourns” [Weil sie stumm ist,
trauert die Natur], he writes—SW 1, 73; II.1, 155.)15 However, his ­writings

14
 For a discussion regarding the way in which Benjamin’s conception of language
attempts to bypass the categories of subject and object, see Bröcker 746–47, 750.
15
 To be sure, nature as God created it is already mute according to Benjamin—other-
wise there would be no need for human language. In Benjamin’s account, the decisive
development following the Fall has to do with the degradation of names, which is in
turn bound up with knowledge of good and evil. As he observes, the book of Genesis
tells us that God, upon seeing Creation, pronounced it good: “on the seventh day,
612 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

from the 1930s are another matter entirely: rather than attribute
the persisting muteness of nature to the Fall, these essays interpret
silence as a symptom of specific historical conditions.16 More specifi-
cally, speechlessness comes to be symptomatic of the degradation of
experience—which is to say Erfahrung, not Erlebnis—in modernity.17
This tendency is best exemplified by “The Storyteller: Observations
on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” (1936), an essay which, though com-
posed soon after the artwork essay, also rehearses the analysis of modern
“shock” that “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1940) will subsequently
elaborate. What concerns the matter at hand is how “The Storyteller”
describes modernity in terms of the contradiction between experience
and expression: according to this analysis, the ascent of modern tech-
nology has transformed human experience at a pace that outstrips the
capacities of speech, the primary means that people have always had at
their disposal in order to record and hand down their understanding
of the world. From this perspective, the crisis of modernity manifests

God had already cognized with the words of creation. And God saw that it was good.”
If evil originally had no place in nature, then it follows that knowledge of good and
evil constitutes a false distinction that names nothing; it is as though this knowledge
is the product of a form of pseudo-naming that merely mimics the creative powers
of language. Benjamin continues: “Knowledge of good and evil abandons name, it is
a knowledge from outside, the uncreated imitation of the created word. Name steps
outside itself in this knowledge: the Fall marks the birth of the human word, in which
name no longer lives intact and which has stepped out of name-language, the language
of knowledge, from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become
expressly, as it were externally, magic.” What characterizes the human word is its reduc-
tion of language to an instrument; to cite Benjamin once more, “The [human] word
must communicate something (other than itself).” The account of judgment and law,
which Benjamin goes on to elaborate from these observations, need not concern us
here; what matters for the present argument is how nature remains imprisoned in its
own silence as a result of this “decay of the blissful Adamite spirit of language.” See
SW 1, 71; II.1, 152–53.
16
 Indeed, as Bröcker points out in his discussion of Benjamin’s notion of judgement
(Urteil), “Das Ende der paradiesischen Einheit von Sprache und Schöpfung bedeutet
zugleich den Beginn der Geschichte.” See “Sprache” 747. In other words, according
to “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” the muteness or silence of
Creation after the Fall is not so much the result of particular historical circumstances
as much as it characterizes the very condition of historical existence itself.
17
 The difference between Erfahrung and Erlebnis will be familiar to those readers who
are acquainted with Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Although this
text was written nearly five years after “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” the distinction that Benjamin makes between these two terms in this
essay remains relevant to the present discussion: Erfahrung designates “tradition-bound,
long experience,” “experience over time,” whereas Erlebnis concerns “the isolated
experience of the moment.” See SW 4, 344, footnote 7. The definitions of these two
terms are the work of the editors.
 M L N 613

itself as the increasing inability of people to articulate their encoun-

ters with the violent forces unleashed by technology. Thus, referring
to soldiers who fought in the First World War, Benjamin notes in the
first section of his essay on Leskov: “Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of
the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent
[verstummt]—not richer but poorer in communicable experience
[mitteilbarer Erfahrung]? What poured out in the flood of war books
ten years later was anything but experience that can be shared orally
[Erfahrung . . . die von Mund zu Mund geht]” (SW 3, 144; II.2, 439).
The affinity between this vocabulary and “On Language as Such and
on the Language of Man” is unmistakable: the muteness of the men,
the inability to communicate experience, books that strive to convey
something unspeakable—all of these details recall motifs that antedate
“The Storyteller” by two decades. The same holds true of Benjamin’s
description regarding the significance of the figure of the storyteller,
whose craft required him to draw his materials from a knowledge of
the world that one generation transmits to the next by word of mouth:
“Experience [Erfahrung] which is passed on from mouth to mouth
[die von Mund zu Mund geht] is the source from which all storytellers
have drawn” (SW 3, 144; II.2, 440). As this second citation suggests,
the pre-modern world of the storyteller was the world of Erfahrung: an
epoch in which the communicability of experience through speech was
still possible.18 Nonetheless, what sets apart these comments in “The
Storyteller” from those in “On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man” is how this 1936 text attributes the breakdown of the spoken
word to the exposure of the “tiny, fragile human body” to “a force field
of destructive torrents and explosions” (SW 3, 144; II.2, 439).
These points of contrast present a better idea of what Benjamin
means when he claims that “another nature speaks to the camera
as compared to the eye.” For while “On Language as Such and on
the Language of Man” describes how the act of naming frees the

18
 Here readers should take careful note of the fact that speech and experience (un-
derstood as Erfahrung) are not two different phenomena for Benjamin, as if the former
represented one option among many for describing the latter. Rather, the connection
between these two terms is much stronger to the extent that Erfahrung is inseparable
from speech, that one of its defining characteristics is precisely the manner in which
it is orally conveyed. As Thomas Weber correctly notes: “Erfahrung ist ein Artikulati-
onsbegriff, wobei Artikulation im doppelten Sinne als Verknüpfung und als Ausdruck
zu verstehen ist. Erfahrung ist eine Dimension menschlicher Praxis, in der Selbst- und
Weltverhältnis derart artikuliert sind, daß das Weltverhältnis als Selbstverhältnis und
umgekehrt das Selbstverhältnis als Weltverhältnis artikulierbar wird.” See “Erfahrung,”
Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 1, 236.
614 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

language of things from speechlessness, “The Work of Art in the Age

of Its Technological Reproducibility” describes how modern visual
media articulate an analogous “language” of historical phenomena
that threaten to exhaust human speech entirely.19 However, the true
affinity between language and film in Benjamin’s writings only comes
into focus after considering his notion of translation. In order to see
how this is the case, it is useful to turn once more to “On Language
as Such and on the Language of Man” rather than to “The Task of
the Translator.”20 There he writes: “The translation [Übersetzung] of
the language of things into that of man is not only a translation of
the mute into the sonic; it is also the translation of the nameless into
name. It is therefore the translation of an imperfect language into
a more perfect one, and cannot but add something to it, namely
knowledge” (SW 1, 70; II.1, 151). Invoking a concept that recalls “Two
Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” (1914–15) and anticipates “The Task
of the Translator,” Benjamin goes on to remark that the translation
of the (mute) language of nature into the human language of names
constitutes the task [Aufgabe] that God imparted to man: “In receiv-
ing the unspoken, nameless language of things and converting it by
name into sounds, man performs this task” (SW 1, 70; II.1, 152). Read
in conjunction with “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility” and “The Storyteller,” these remarks demonstrate
that, as a process that enables the language of nature to speak, trans-
lation resembles the manner in which film allows the experience of
shock to be heard.

19
 A word must be said about the peculiar manner in which Benjamin claims that
visual media, in particular film, are supposed to realize this articulation. Recall that
the visual technologies that are revolutionizing perception partake in the very violence
of shock: hence Benjamin’s remark cited above that film “exploded [sprengen] this
prison world with the dynamite of the split second.” This claim suggests the homeo-
pathic character of film, which is to say that it suggests how film overcomes shock through
shock. From the perspective of his preoccupation with language, this means that only
a dose of the very violence that has undermined speech can contribute to a new way
of articulating modern Erlebnisse. As Benjamin notes: “If one considers the dangerous
tensions which technology and its consequences have engendered in the masses at
large—tendencies which at critical stages take on a psychotic character—one also has
to recognize that this same technologization has created the possibility of psychic im-
munization against such mass psychoses. It does so by means of certain films in which
the forced development of sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their
natural and dangerous maturation in the masses.” See SW 3, 118; VII.1, 377. See also
Hansen 185–86, 210–11.
20
 For a discussion concerning the significance of Benjamin’s use of this term in “On
Language as Such and on the Language of Man” vis-à-vis other competing theories of
language, see Menninghaus 37–38.
 M L N 615

Film and translation also resemble one another inasmuch as

both constitute processes involving the displacement of an original.
Benjamin’s claim in the artwork essay that photographic media have
brought about the temporal and spatial dislocation of the artwork is
doubtlessly familiar to many readers. To cite a well-known passage: “The
here and now of the original [das Hier und Jetzt des Originals] underlies
the conception of its authenticity [Echtheit], and on the latter in turn
is founded the idea of a tradition which has passed the object down
as the same, identical thing [als ein Selbes und Identisches] to the pres-
ent day.” By bringing out “aspects of the original that are accessible
only to the lens” rather than the eye, and placing “the copy of the
original in situations which the original itself cannot attain” (SW 3, 103;
VII.1, 352–53), technologically advanced visual media undermine the
singularity of location that underlies the identity and authority of the
artwork. In a similar fashion, translation, although it does not generate
a multiplicity of texts that are identical to the original, nevertheless
entails dislocation rather than appropriation; in the words of Carol
Jacobs, “translation does not transform an original foreign language
into one we may call our own, but rather, renders radically foreign that
language we believe to be ours.”21 Yet, the disruptive effects of transla-
tion for Benjamin are not only evident from the way that it reveals
retroactively the fault lines of the original; in addition, it involves an
implicit temporal displacement of the original by submitting it to a
series of successive transformations—“a continuum of transformations”
[ein Kontinuum von Verwandlungen] (SW 1, 70; II.1, 151), as Benjamin
calls it in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”22 It

21
 Carol Jacobs, “The Monstrosity of Translation: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the
Translator,’” Telling Time: Lévi-Strauss, Ford, Lessing, Benjamin, de Man, Wordsworth, Rilke
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 129. Paul de Man makes the identical
point when he notes: “We think we are at ease in our own language, we feel a coziness,
a familiarity, a shelter in the language we call our own, in which we think that we are
not alienated. What the translation reveals is that this alienation is at its strongest in
our relation to our own original language, that the original language within which we
are engaged is disarticulated in a way which imposes upon us a particular alienation, a
particular suffering.” See “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’”
The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 84.
22
 Benjamin makes a similar remark in “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel und
Tragedy” (1916), one of the preliminary fragments that anticipate his study The Origin
of German Tragic Drama (1925): “Language in the process of change [Das Wort in Ver-
wandlung] is the linguistic principle of Trauerspiel. Words have a pure emotional life
cycle in which they purify themselves by developing from the natural sound to the pure
sound of feeling. For such words, language is merely a transitional phase within the
entire life cycle, and in them the mourning play finds its voice. It describes the path
616 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

is precisely this notion that “The Task of the Translator” elaborates

when Benjamin refers to “the life and afterlife” [Leben und Fortleben]
of artworks, for example, or claims that “what is meant [ihr Gemeintes]
is never found in relative independence, as in individual words or
sentences” but “in a constant state of flux” [in stetem Wandel] (SW 1,
254, 257; IV.1, 11, 14).23 Thus, to Jacobs and Paul de Man’s observation
that, contrary to all appearances, Benjamin’s natural metaphors in
“The Task of the Translator” do not equate translation with a “ripen-
ing” or “maturation,” one must add that such expressions as “afterlife”
and “flux” suggest that this activity undermines the original instead of
completing it. As motion and movement, it places into question the
self-identity of the original, requiring it to take leave of itself that it
might rise and dissolve like smoke “into a higher and purer linguistic
air, as it were” (SW 1, 257; IV.1, 14).24
Unlike translation, however, film according to Benjamin is indicative
of a larger historical tendency: “a massive upheaval in the domain of
objects handed down from the past—a shattering of tradition which
is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity”
(SW 3, 104; VII.1, 353).25 Benjamin’s analysis suggests that film, while
undermining the authority of tradition, nonetheless contributes to
the foundations for an alternative comportment toward experience
(understood here in the widest sense of the term) inasmuch as photo­
graphic media, by articulating the shocks that have increasingly come
to characterize the experience of the modern masses, could potentially
constitute a prosthetic memory capable of demystifying certain regis-
ters of experience by rendering them communicable. Admittedly, film is
but one cultural artifact toward which Benjamin turns in the hopes of
discovering modes of expression that can occupy the place that tradi-
tion has evacuated; one could just as well point to his interest in such
authors as Baudelaire (who saw in the experiential detritus of moder-
nity the source of a new way of poeticizing) or Kafka (whose writings

from natural sound via lament to music.” See SW 1, 60; II.1, 138. For a discussion of
the anticipatory temporality underlying Benjamin’s concept of translation, see Werner
Hamacher’s remarks on prolepsis in “Intensive Sprachen” 203–06.
23
 For a reading of “The Task of the Translator” that also emphasizes the function
of translation as a displacement or Entstellung of the original, see Thomas Dörr, Kritik
und Übersetzung: Die Praxis der Reproduktion im Frühwerk Walter Benjamins (Gießen: Focus,
1988) 118–21.
24
 See Jacobs 130–31 and de Man 85, 89.
25
 For a thorough discussion of the development of Benjamin’s analysis of tradition,
see Howard Caygill, “Benjamin, Heidegger, and the Destruction of Tradition,” Walter
Benjamin’s Philosophy 1–31.
 M L N 617

bear certain affinities to oral tradition).26 But what distinguishes film

from such writers is its inherently collective character—a decisive factor
when one considers Benjamin’s concern in “The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” with the social integration
of modern technology in an age of mass political movements.27

IV
Among the best-known passages in Benjamin’s œuvre, the conclusion
to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
has received wide discussion for having introduced the notion of “aes-
theticized politics”; in light of such attention it is therefore striking that
the acoustic motifs in these lines have gone unnoticed. Consider for
example the manner in which Benjamin conceives of the encounter
between fascism and communism. On the one hand, fascism presses
technology in the service of aestheticism: “‘Fiat ars—pereat mundus’
says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic
gratification of a sense of perception altered by technology.” The
passage continues: “Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced
by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art [Der Kommunismus
antwortet ihm mit der Politisierung der Kunst]” (SW 3, 122; VII.1, 384).
Note well: “‘Fiat ars—pereat mundus,’ says fascism,” “Communism
replies by politicizing art.” These references to vocalization suggest that
Benjamin does not simply approach fascism and communism as two
mutually opposed political doctrines; rather, he treats them as two
distinct modes of articulation regarding the possible constellations of
aesthetics and politics in modernity that the artwork essay attempts
to translate into a critical language. Moreover, his description of the
confrontation between fascism and communism as a dialogue indicates
the agonistic, tragic character of mass politics.
The importance of speech for Benjamin’s analysis of the struggle
between these two movements does not end here; in addition, ­fascism

26
 Benjamin writes of Kafka’s stories: “They are not parables [Gleichnisse], yet do not
want to be taken at their face value; they lend themselves to quotation and can be
recounted for purposes of clarification [sie sind derart beschaffen, daß man sie zitieren, zur
Erläuterung erzählen kann].” See SW 3, 803; II.1, 420.
27
 Thus, as Benjamin notes: “In film, the technological reproducibility of the prod-
uct is not an externally imposed condition of its mass dissemination, as it is, say, in
literature or painting. The technological reproducibility of films is based directly on
the technology of their production. This not only makes possible the mass dissemina-
tion of films in the most direct way, but actually enforces it.” See SW 3, 123, footnote
8; VII.1, 356, footnote 2.
618 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

and communism, as two possible comportments toward modern

technology, represent two competing conceptions regarding the
proper place of articulation in the political domain. This brings us to
Benjamin’s famous distinction between the “aestheticizing of politics”
and “the politicizing of art.” In order to understand these notions, it
is useful to recall the following passage from the end of “The Work
of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving
intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation
in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them
rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks
to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical
outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life [eine Ästhetisierung des poli-
tischen Lebens]. (SW 3, 120–21; VII.1, 382)

On one level, the “aestheticizing of political life” refers to that process

whereby the artistic values of l’art pour l’art engulf the political sphere; to
cite Benjamin once again: “With D’Annunzio, decadence made its entry
into political life; with Marinetti, Futurism; and with Hitler, the Bohemian
tradition of Schwabing” (SW 3, 121; VII.1, 382). As these references to
D’Annunzio, Marinetti, and Hitler suggest, Benjamin sees a direct line
of descent from nineteenth-century aestheticism to the political crisis of
the thirties.28 However, the passage above is striking on account of the
way that it mentions expression (Ausdruck)—a direct reference to the aes-
theticist emphasis upon self-expression—at the same time that it recalls
“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”: “all expression
[Ausdruck], insofar as it is a communication of contents of the mind,
is to be classed as language. And expression, by its whole innermost
nature, is certainly to be understood as language” (SW 1, 62–63; II.1,
140–41). In the context of the artwork essay, this reference to expression
is unmistakably pejorative, connoting an impoverished substitute for the
masses’ right [Recht] to abolish capitalist relations of production. Misap-
propriating modern technology in order to impose a false resolution
upon the contradiction between revolutionary means of production and
regressive social relations under capitalism (“the discrepancy between the

28
 It is worth noting here that Benjamin offers a preliminary version of this argument
in “Theories of German Fascism” (1930), a review of the anthology War and Warriors,
edited by Ernst Jünger. Referring to the resurgent militarism endorsed by the writers in
this volume, Benjamin notes: “The most rabidly decadent origins of this new theory of
war are emblazoned on their foreheads: it is nothing other than an uninhibited transla-
tion [note well: the German term here is Übertragung rather than Übersetzung—JRG] of
the principles of l’art pour l’art to war itself.” See SW 2, 314; III, 240.
 M L N 619

enormous means of production and their inadequate use in the process

of production”—SW 3, 121; VII.1, 383), fascism mystifies expression as
a vehicle for the masses’ immediate gratification.
Here it is important to note how Benjamin, in his aside about commu-
nism, does not refer to the “politicizing of aesthetics” but to the “politiciz-
ing of art.” The reason for this difference becomes apparent when one
takes the German word for art [Kunst] in the most fundamental sense
of the term as machina: structure, apparatus, or means.29 Understood in
this manner, the politicizing of art is not a call for ideologically vulgar,
tendentious art as much as it is a demand for approaching technology
as a force whose relationship to society concerns the future of humanity.
But how? The most obvious way would pertain to the ability of modern
technology to help abolish capitalism and contribute to the revolution-
ary reorganization of social relationships. However, Benjamin does not
only understand the revolutionary use of modern technology in strictly
Marxian terms; he also sees it as a means of reconfiguring humanity’s
relationship to nature. In “To The Planetarium,” the conclusion of One-
Way Street (1928), he already noted of World War I: “This immense wooing
of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale—that
is, in the spirit of technology [im Geist der Technik]. But because the lust
for profit of the ruling classes sought satisfaction through it, technol-
ogy betrayed mankind and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath”
(SW 1, 486–87; IV.1, 147). In other words, the defining contradiction of
modernity is not simply the one between the private ownership of the
means of production and the social character of productive relations, as
a more orthodox Marxian reading would have it; rather, it concerns the
tension between the private ownership of the means of production and
the new physis that is emerging from the very forces that capitalism has
developed.30 From this perspective, the politicizing of art would mobi-
lize technology for the purposes of liberating the language of nature.31

29
 In this regard one could say that Benjamin understands the term Kunst in terms
of its etymological kinship with the German auxiliary verb können (to do, to be able).
See Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, “Kunst,” Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 5: K (Leipzig: Verlag
von S. Hirzel, 1873) 2667–68.
30
 See also the concluding remarks to “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia” (1929). See SW 2, 217–18; II.1, 310.
31
 In this regard it helps to recall the following remark from “Theories of German Fas-
cism”: “Deeply imbued with its own depravity, technology gave shape to the apocalyptic
face of nature and reduced nature to silence [brachte sie zum Verstummen]—even though
this technology had the power to give nature its voice [die Kraft, die ihr die Sprache hätte
geben können].” See SW 2, 319; III 247. This comment is remarkable for the way that
Benjamin brings the rhetoric of speech and speechlessness to bear directly upon his
analysis of fascism. Although this citation does not explicitly develop the communist
620 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

However, Benjamin does not strictly equate the term “nature” with the
external, non-human environment. Essays such as “The Artwork in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Storyteller,” and “On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire” suggest that he also regards the human
body, particularly the senses, as a form of vestigial nature.32 Thus, having
suffered under the regime of shock, the body too awaits release from
bondage that is only possible through a revolutionary transformation of
perception that will enable it to recount the wounds and mutilations to
which it has been submitted in the name of progress.33
In concluding this reading it is necessary to add one last observation.
Until this point it appeared as though Benjamin’s theory of translation
served as the model for his subsequent notion of film; in fact, nothing
could be further from the case. For if Benjamin conceives of translation
as the dynamic transformation of an original text, then it follows from
the discernable parallels between film and translation in his writings
that what is also at stake here is the translating of translation.34 To the
extent that translation entails dislocation for Benjamin, this “trans-
lating of translation” amounts to the displacement of displacement—an
expression that suggests in turn an original condition of displacement
that existed prior to its decentering. But how could displacement, a
term which by definition refers to that which has lost its grounding,
possibly possess a stable or singular self-identity? In other words,
what does it mean to displace displacement, if displacement itself is
already displaced? One might begin by recalling de Man’s observation
that translation for Benjamin is among those activities that “kill the

alternative to the fascist misappropriation of modern technology as the artwork essay does,
the reference here to the capacity of technology to “give” nature its language indicates
what a revolutionary assimilation of technology would mean for Benjamin. A similar
gesture occurs at the end of this text: “But even the habitués of the chthonic forces of
terror, who carry their volumes of Klages in their packs, will not learn one-tenth of what
natures promises [verspricht] its less idly curious but more sober children, who possess in
technology not a fetish of doom but a key to happiness.” See SW 2, 321; III, 250.
32
 For an extended discussion of the background behind the politics of perception and
corporeality motivating Benjamin’s theory of film, see Miriam Hansen, “Room-for-Play:
Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 3–45.
33
 See also Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork
Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3–41. Although Buck-Morss’s approach
and conclusion differ from the present discussion, readers are encouraged to consider
this article for the way that it connects Benjamin’s concern with the body to “The Work
of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”
34
 Jacobs’s reading already points in this direction when she notes how the notion of
translation that Benjamin develops in “The Task of the Translator” translates the everyday
meaning of the word “translation.” See “The Monstrosity of Translation” 129.
 M L N 621

original, by discovering that the original was already dead.”35 Taking

this as a clue, let us turn to the following well-known passage from
“The Task of the Translator”:
Fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together must match one
another in the smallest details, although they need to not be like one
another. In the same way a translation, instead of imitating the sense of
the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of
meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable
as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.
(SW 1, 260; IV.1, 18)

In her reading of Benjamin, Jacobs has remarked that one would ren-
der the foregoing passage translated by Harry Zohn more faithfully as
“Fragments of a vessel, in order to be articulated together, must follow
[folgen in the original German—JRG] one another in the smallest detail
but need not resemble one another.”36 According to her reading as
well as de Man’s, this detail undermines any attempt to read behind
Benjamin’s account of translation a totalizing impulse.37 Yet Jacob’s
observation is also relevant for the matter at hand inasmuch as her
version brings out the emphasis upon the sequential and the diachronic
in Benjamin’s language. Not only is this of interest for the way that
he invokes these words with respect to a vase (a representative for
the plastic arts which, as in Lessing’s Laokoon, have traditionally been
associated with the register of synchrony).38 In addition, diachronic
temporality constitutes one of the defining characteristics of another
medium whose specificity consists in the progression of images through
time: film. This is not to suggest that Benjamin’s theory of film is the
logical conclusion of his theory of translation as much as it is to suggest

35
 De Man 84. See also 97–98: “And what happens to the original—I think can be
said—the original is disarticulated, the original is reduced to the status of prose, is
decanonized, all that by the process of translation, because the impossibility of transla-
tion is due to disruptions which are there in the original. . . .” Keeping with this line
of thought, he goes on to note: “The translation is a way of reading the original which
will reveal those inherent weaknesses in the original, not in the sense that the original
is then no longer a great work or anything, or that it wouldn’t be worthy of admira-
tion or anything of the sort, but in a much more fundamental way: that the original
is not canonical, that the original is a piece of ordinary language, in a way—prosaic,
ordinary language—which as such belongs as much to that category as [to the category
of original]. It is desacralized.”
36
 Jacobs 136 (italics mine).
37
 See Jacobs 137, de Man 90–91.
38
 The author would like to thank Ms. Joyce Tsai of the Humanities Center at the
Johns Hopkins University for this observation.
622 JOSHUA ROBERT GOLD

that translation—at least as “The Task of the Translator” elaborates

it—was always already something other than itself, a designation for a
movement of mutation and proliferation that could not otherwise be
named as long as it remained contained within itself. It needed this
second, seemingly derivative term—“film”—to release its innermost
potential as an expression of non-identity.
The Johns Hopkins University