In Miriam Hansen’s article “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” she identifies some diverging lines of argument in Benjamin’s “Artwork” essay: the spatio-temporal line, which she indicates works on a parallel between the cinematic apparatus’s restructuring of temporality in spatial division—the cut of the montage, the shock that enables a different awareness of apperception—and the mimetic-reproductive line, which she indicates is problematic in its conflation of semiotic and political senses of representation, “making the latter vouch for the revolutionary potential of the former” (185). Benjamin’s argument relies on this slippage inasmuch as he’s advocating the revolutionary potential (in terms of political representation) of a series of shocks that rely on radicalized (but still meaning-bearing) representations. And it is here that she makes her first charge against Benjamin’s argument, noting that with the decline of monadic and contemplative (that is, auratic) aesthetic experience in favor of shock-induced collective appropriation of art on the part of the masses (as opposed to a single viewer descending into the work of art), there is a concomitant decline in the possibility of aesthetic experience for the masses: deaesthetization. And thus the “‘aura’ plays a precarious yet indispensable part” (186) in Benjamin’s theory of experience.
But Hansen points out that the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze as a necessary condition of one experiencing the aura of phenomena is dependant on the fact of social witness, though it is the witness of another self, one unknown to but originating from oneself. So here distance (that which marks the altered conditions of apperception that reveal the aura) is figured temporally, not spatially, in the folded-in registers of memory and history. Locating this capacity of aesthetic experience in the past is crucial for Benjamin’s argument, says Hansen, because such temporality allows the aura to be recognized as such: in decay, fading into the dispersal of discourse and the changing conditions of apperception contingent upon the historical moment of industrialized mediation. And here again we see the ambivalence with which Benjamin saw the aura, though this time in the negative, as it happens in a temporality that presents us with both “the decay of the aura [a good, in that it allows collective apperception to overtake monadic apperception] and the atrophy of the vision of a better nature [seemingly our only means of apprehending the potential good that the decay of the aura presents us]” (Benjamin quoted in Hansen 189). Thus we look forward to a time, a future anterior, from which we will look back on what will have been: a radicalized (impossible to predict, and difficult even to anticipate) futurity. Hansen suggests that the radicalized futurity presented by Benjamin has its origins in Jewish Messianism, an evental and eruptive conception of history as bound not by determinate (that is to say, calindrical) structures but barely containing the burgeoning possibility of revolution.
Moving through the surrealist applications of shock, and likewise through the concept of the flaneur as he who aimlessly flits about the city aiming all the more to map the city in the mnemotechnic of ephemeral consciousness, Hansen settles on the mimetic faculty as both agent and archive of change. Benjamin’s concept of non-sensuous similarity rests on the transient aspect of language, housing all change within its own ever-shifting walls, complete with porous and non-porous membranes, and directing us back to a non-arbitrary (contra Saussure) resemblance that is again not possible without a witness, the witness of language itself, seen most clearly in the act of translation, or in the cast of the hand itself that does the writing. And keeping with the shifting grounds of language’s potential(s) vis-à-vis its correspondences, Hansen suggests that mimesis in Benjamin is more properly thought (with semiotics) as an index: a metonym to historical time-place. And in employing such an aporetic reading strategy Hansen claims the stakes for Benjamin are revealed: a different use of language, a mobilization of the mimetic power of language (archival-agential) against the ‘once-upon-a-time’ of classical historical narrative through the use of a heuristic gaze—not hermeneutical, but dialectical. Thus the linear movements of capital that reify semblance into resemblance are confronted by emphatic experience’s hither and lee dialectical allegorizing. Which seems to suggest that Benjamin’s revolutionary work of art is only such in the constancy of a history that is perpetually overturning itself—and this mimetic transformation happens most in the cinema of shock technique (despite the fact that Hanson maintains that a powerful dialecticism is diluted in the Artwork essay that gets recuperated in later work, like “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is indeed where I’m culling terms like calindrical and evental). Through a process of allegorical remembering, that is a narrativizing of the constructedness of human/natural life, cinema makes material what has been made, something Hansen calls “a logic of double negation” (203), refigured here as procreative: producing the thingness of the thing, the reification of the reified gaze, giving “aesthetic expression to the scars of human self-alienation” (206).
Setting up a constitutive dialectical ambiguity at the heart of Benjamin’s endorsement of a distracted mode of reception, Hansen figures it thus:
Shock of modernity plus the simultaneous experience-impoverishing shield it provokes
And
Shock as moment of sexual recognition of loss, exemplifying the dislocating impact of auratic experience in general
Thus shock takes on a strategic significance, propelling the human body into moments of recognition, opening up new avenues of tactile and optical reception, and activating “layers of unconscious memory buried in the reified structures of subjectivity” (211).
Hansen points up the way that different threads of Benjamin’s argument—quantity into quality, destabilized experience as quotidian—play asymmetrical roles, the latter being dominant, along with transformative mimesis. Moving through a psychoanalytical side-by-side comparison with the concept of the uncanny that involves the fetishization of Benjamin’s mother-body figure, she finishes by noting the way Benjamin, even as he’s already participating in the psychoanalytic discourse, and perpetuating the patriarchal fetishization of the gaze, evades these registers through the deployment of a subject shattered, and re-narrativized, but not into the self-same subject, and maybe into an object—something not at all endorsed by psychoanalysis.
Recapitulating her argument, and then extending it, Hansen then makes another claim to Benjamin’s unwitting endorsement of the aura: within distraction lies the ability to lose oneself, to become dreamlike (219), and this is interesting, mainly because the avenues for revolutionary and radicalized consciousness can happen within what traditional Marxism would call false consciousness. Moving through a (too) brief mention of the resistance to reified structures and stilted political economies available in and through Eros, she moves to danger: film, with its deliberate borrowing and mixing of radicalized experiential modes, translates (and transfigures) an individual experience into a collective (and cathartic) one. Valorizing Benjamin over Adorno, and then Adorno and Horkheimer, Hansen maintains that Benjamin’s project was ultimately one of redemption, not indictment—as with his one-time friend, Adorno—and that since Adorno and Horkheimer have been “vindicated” (her word), the value of Benjamin’s theses go toward theorizing alternative mediations, and what come of them.
Given that this has turned into an exercise in tracing an extended argument, and its success is dubious at best, I’d simply like to leave one question:
o In some senses the avant-garde features in both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s argument; with Adorno it’s blatant that “artistic music,” in the case of the “On the Fetish-Character in Music” essay, means avant-garde, but with Benjamin, less so. Is it indeed only the avant-garde that can do this collectivizing?

In some attempt to provide an answer, and some original content to this blog, I’ll start with the notion, explicated by Hansen, of shock. My first example from the media is again Bill Maher’s live talk show, Real Time with Bill Maher. This show is funny, causing often irrepressible and involuntary affective states of confusion and displacement with every joke. That’s not to say they’re all killer jokes, but that humor works that way, and even when a joke bombs it triggers an affective state, but when it goes well, usually it makes us laugh. And that’s practically the definition of humor—transgressions and offences that strike us as particularly inappropriate but that make us laugh, and that they’re temporally dependant (the timing of the joke). This is the distracted mode of reception: a new tactile awareness (the involuntary laugh).

Home Box Office (HBO) runs a bumper before all original programming with a voice over of the following: “Raw. Outspoken. Uninhibited.” Which is followed by the TV—MA tag for adult content and adult language, which of course indicates how not raw and outspoken they are, inasmuch as they’d rather not give you the raw in the raw, as it were, so as to spoil the possibility of shock as a result of their programming. On 10/07/05, this bumper ran before Real Time with Bill Maher. And as usual, he started with a video production piece before he rolls the credits and montage—not live, or in real time.
Shot in black and white video with grain added in post-production, and set with a noir feel, the music is some crap (smooth) jazz with lots of saxophone over extended chords cycling in a pseudo-sophisticated II-V-I progression, but that music fades and the camera finds a tall, dark, and handsome Euro-stud with shellacked hair and killer pecs who says:
“Who are you?”
Then a card comes in, moves across the screen, followed by a picture of Harriet Miers, Bush’s second pick for the Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Sandra Day O’Conner. The card says “Mysterious.” Another floating pic of Miers looking PTA, then another card: “Dispassionate.” A third pic, another card: “Unqualified.”
Our Euro-hottie comes back, stern look on his smooth and chiseled face, says (emphatically):
“Who Are You?”
To which an equally hot girl with a waif waist and long black hair, in a shimmery black dress, says (in a whisper):
“I’m whoever you want me to be.”
Directly after which we see a perfume bottle with a tag superimposed on top of it that reads:
“HARRIET—the fragrance.”

Cut to color and the opening montage. The theme music is a sort of funk with all sorts of pop-culture sound bites, one of which calls out the query: “Do you know what time it is?” There is a countdown, and running below the montage—complete with images of Egypt (the Sphinx), Greece (temple to Apollo), an American lynching, the Emancipation Proclamation, George Washington in duo-tone (by Andy Warhol), Hitler raving at Nuremburg, the lift off of the Apollo moon shot, the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, the Hindenburg crashing in New Jersey, Mao, Reagan, a bald eagle, the Buddha in jade, an immolated (dead) body, and soldiers in haz-mat gear packing automatic weapons—is a crawl: “[REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER] . . . [LIVE TONIGHT] BILL GREETS MOVIE STAR BEN AFFLECK [LIVE TONIGHT] NOVELIST SALMAN RUSHDIE [LIVE TONIGHT] CONSERVATIVE ICON ANN COULTER [LIVE TONIGHT] MASTER-BLOGGER ANDREW SULLIVAN [LIVE TONIGHT] AUTHOR KAYLA WILLIAMS [LIVE TONIGHT].” And after this, the host, Bill Maher, comes out looking dapper in a designer jacket, brown, shirt, brown, no tie—good shoes. There is a card in the corner that reads: LIVE.

He’s got a monologue:
“Thank you, thank you—I know why you’re so excited: you just realized you also could be on the Supreme Court!”

After a few jokes about how Bush is so in fear of losing his base he’s promised the right that he’ll nominate “that tiger that killed Roy [of Siegfried and Roy],” he lets go with this one:
“Tom Delay was indicted twice in one week! I, I mean…you almost feel bad for how screwed this guy is because usually when someone wants to beat this kind of rap the person they bribe is Tom Delay!”
Then he moves to Tom Cruise:
“We’ve had another ‘Sudden Terror Alert’ this week—sounds to me like another Bush stunt to repair his image. He wanted to knock up Katie Holmes but Laura said, ‘No!’ You heard the news: Tom and Katie—Tom cat is gonna have kittens. Um. Katie Holmes is pregnant [Maher laughs]; they say if it’s a girl, they’re gonna name it after the mother, Katie, and if it’s a boy, they’re gonna name it after the father—In Vitro. [Laughs again] I kid the Cruises. Listen to this: fellow Scientologists—John Travolta and Kelly Preston—they are trying to convince Katie to have the baby the Scientologist way, which is known as silent birth. I’m not making this up—that’s where, during the delivery, during the delivery (emphatic), the mother doesn’t talk, or scream in any way, or express herself emotionally. Wow! No Yammering. And if it works there, they’re gonna try it on Oprah.”

After this he brings on his guests, but first goes to Ann Coulter:
o Why are conservatives mad at the president?
o Unlike liberals, we’re principled. […] She’s unqualified.
o But you didn’t make that objection with eve3ry other of GWB’s appointments?
 [emphatic] It never occurred [mic input clips because her voice is so loud] to us that he’d nominate, as you say, the cleaning lady—we thought this was clear.

After she demurs once again, Bill goes into GWB again:
o So, what do you think of your boyfriend, George Bush, now, I mean, seriously. I mean, this (Miers’s Appointment to the Supreme Court), the deficit [over this she is heard saying, “I’m not very happy”], he fucked up the hurricane: are you willing to admit that he’s in over his head and always was, and that when Karl Rove looked at him, when Karl Rove looked at him and said ‘I could make him president, that was different than looking at him, [and] saying he should be president?
o No, actually, I’m more mad at you, Bill, because if you hadn’t been so mean to our Georgy this never would have happened. [Smirks] I’m running scared, now.

While it is difficult to do so much transposition—temporally, culturally, formally—there are some interesting notes that come out of using Benjamin, through Hansen’s recuperative strategy regarding the ‘aura,’ to look at Real Time.

First of all, it’s live. Not that this makes it an original, but that the auratic function has been transposed to the live broadcast in some senses, but incompleatly, such that the eruptive finction of the montage just before is perhaps not so shocking as the fact that in live broiadcasts we have the possibility that there may well be a shock or two waiting, shocks which the montage does not provide us, despite its invocation of Hitler, Mao, Reagan—the three biggest criminals of the 20th century. But the fact that it’s on HBO, with its swears and such, denudes the show of the possibility of the ‘fucks’ even getting in the way of our contemplation/absorption of our weekly live talk show.

When Hansen claims that Benjamin’s concept of non-sensuous similarity rests upon an indexical register, that is, it bears the cast of the hand of the writer, she seems to suggest that this indexical semiotics registers the scars of human self-alienation, but without the presence (even as a rehearsal) of the initial perpetration of those scars. We get the damage, but it’s not so damaging. Rather, it is collectivizing. We see this in the repeat phrases of Maher’s monologue, and in the particular glee with which he gives Ann Coulter her due, even though she is a friend of Maher’s. This is through the way he asks it, the affective register, but that rhetorical slant is achieved not just by the words, but also by their being couched in humor—your boyfriend, George Bush—and this helps to recuperate the aura of the moment too, almost as if mediating the shock such that it is lessened allows for it to be heard at all. Of course this works for Coulter as well, as when she admits to Bush’s failings, that he fucked up the hurricane is the shock that they both agree needs to be out there, even as it is diluted. Surface scratched.