The Photographer as Producer: on the possibilities of photography after Walter Benjamin.
Transcript of my talk at The Left Conference - Photography and Film Criticism, given at the Faculty of Arts of the Unviersity of Lisbon, 9-10th November, 2018.
The aim of my talk is to present a reflection on the hypothesis of the author as producer, as raised by Walter Benjamin in 1934. Although his focus is in literature, I will try to articulate his hypothesis to discuss the possibilities of photography. This basically means discussing photography through a perspective of photography that takes into account the social relations of production from which it results. I guess despite being known to any Benjamin scholar, this text hasn’t received the proper amount of attention and wasn’t really approached as a possible tool for expanding on Benjamin’s methodology. I know that trying to do that in 15 minutes is impossible, but I guess we might be able to identify a track that may lad to a concise reflection on the possibilities of photography through Benjamin’s thinking. As you will eventually see, I believe these possibilities, although arrived at theoretically, are essentially of practical concern.
I’m dividing my talk in three parts. First, I will review Benjamin’s theory of the author as producer. In a second moment, I will relate this theory to Benjamin’s philosophy of photography. And finally, I will sketch an argument on whether it is possible or not, and if so how it is possible to think photography from the onset of the social relations of production. I will do that by referring more to the role played by pictorial representation and the mechanical apparatus than to the social position of potential photographers themselves. Perhaps some of you might be expecting a large number of photographs to accompany my argument, but I must say I will use only few examples from where my attempt to take over Benjamin’s theory derived, actually. If we have time enough at the end of the presentation, I´d be glad to talk more about them.
1. Reviewing Benjamin’s hypothesis
In the words of Benjamin’s biographers, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Benjamin’s essay The Author as Producer ‘examines the relation between a literary work’s political tendency and its aesthetic quality’ (2014, p. 430). In doing so, it matters for Benjamin to think of a functional transformation [Umfunktionierung] of ‘cultural materials and practices that had therefore served the status quo … to change the apparatus of production’ (Eiland & Jennings, 2014, p. 441). The key, for Benjamin, is, thus, to criticise and speak against a political tendency that, ‘however revolutionary it may seem, has a counterrevolutionary function so long as the writer feels his solidarity with the proletariat only in his attitudes’ (Benjamin, 2005, p. 772). What is important, this way, is to analyse and think the work of art not simply through the form/content dichotomy, but by evaluating this relation vis-à-vis the existence of the work conditioned by the social relations of production.
Though Benjamin’s concern is mainly with literature, the medium that will serve as a support for his argument is photography. Specifically, the kind of photography that met with literature in the early 1930s Soviet Union, by the encounter between authors and readers in the Soviet newspapers. Something quite common to us today, newspaper op-ed and letters to the editor were seen by Benjamin, in the Soviet context, as a means to democratize the social construction of literary works, as there would be an effort toward a continuous re-signification of text and images through the interaction between author and readers. This allowed thinking in whose service the author was putting his activity. In the Soviet case, this service was evidently in favour of the proletariat. This way, the author should be seen as an active producer and mediator of the relations of production and aesthetic creation, expressed in its technique. What is at stake, thus, is the transformation undergone in (at first) literary praxis ‘which is neither merely political nor merely aesthetic, but historical in character’ (Stopford, 1990, p. 185). It was only possible for Soviet literature to become a progressive literature because the historical moment allowed its praxis to be transformed. Preceding aesthetical considerations, therefore, Benjamin sees the possibility for progressive art only within a correct understanding of the historical possibilities and means for the practice of art.
2. A Short History made long: the question of photography.
Despite focusing on literature, photography is central for Benjamin’s theory of the author as producer, for in the core of this theory resides the need to think on the possibilities of producing art opened by the development of new technologies. In this, photography was a revolution, as it caused a caesura in the idea of representation and technical reproducibility. As he saw in pre-industrial photography a representational revolution, Benjamin saw in technology itself the means for a politicization of art. If Fascism made use of this potential as means to organizing the right of the masses to express themselves, the photographic revolution showed Benjamin that it was also possible for art, as argued by Susan Buck-Morss (1992, p. 5), ‘to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium’. After all, for Benjamin, the performance of photography could bring about, in views of its ‘objective material, which is opened by enlargement the … visualization of a surface which cannot be perceived by human consciousness’[1] (Köhn, 2006, p. 401).
As technical reproducibility operates a “functional transformation of representation, then, more than a theory of photography within the transforming relations of production, it is necessary t analyse ‘whether the invention of photography … transformed the entire character of art’ (Benjamin, 2006, p.109) In its pre-industrial era, for Benjamin, photography was the determinant representative of the changing relations of production. It must be said that, curiously, that´s where his reflections on photography stop. Nonetheless, it is in its political aspect that photography can be re-evaluated in terms of production.
If nineteenth-century photography had not yet found its contact with the present-ness of captured events, which Benjamin’s declares to be precisely photography’s value, this encounter and the industrialization of photography, nonetheless did not suffocate the decisive relation between photographer and technology. ‘[T]he photographer, like the pianist, has the advantage of a mechanical device that is subjective to restrictive laws’ (Benjamin, 2005b, p.518). Eugène Atget’s work, in this sense, is, for Benjamin, the work that unmasks reality, unmaking THe ‘stifling atmosphere generated by conventional portrait photography’ (idem). What Atget does is adapting the technology and the technique in order to photograph that which had not been, till then, of any interest to photography
(SLIDE 5)
A similar attitude is put into practice by August Sander who, setting out to photograph German types behaved as a direct observant of the people, from the peasant to the highest authority, and put together a training manual on how to look, and read, social relations, taking photography our of its own context and making it creative. In different ways and through different means, Atget and Sander works show us, according to Benjamin, the there is a need not only to get used on seeing and being seen, but that it is necessary to understand how these abilities can be informed by the mediation of technology, altering our perception.
3. The Photographer as Producer.
As photography becomes and industrial process, increasingly linked to publicity and the market, true political tragedy comes forth as photographs of the world progressively start saying less and less, revealing anything about the world they mean to capture. This process is mirrored in political life, as professional politicians are exposed through the many new technologies in order to create their public image, rather than by actual public appearances. Curiously, however, it is precisely in the increasing industrialization of the print media that Benjamin sees the possibility for the dissolution of the figure of the author and its subsequent emergence as a semi-anonymous collective. The starting point of this process – which end Benjamin sees in the case of the Soviet authors – can be seen, again, in Atget. If it is true that Atget adapted the photographic technology and technique in order to photograph something which had, until then, not been of interest to photography, then what is really necessary to be thought is not only what is being photographed, but how is being photographed. It is important to look at the relation therefore, between photographer and apparatus, and photographer and subject. The photographer as a producer can only be thought of as an articulation between knowing how to look and knowing how to represent. If we agree that Atget and Sander may have operated a functional transformation of photography by opening new paradigms in the history of the medium, then this necessarily entails acknowledging that photography has a tradition of its own, which is conventionalized by the encounter between the history of technological development and that of visual representation. The correct tendency, that is, the correct posture adopted by and the correct service ascribed to art, if we are to follow Benjamin’s theory, seems to be, thus, the one that manages to transform the use of the medium at hand, giving to it a progressive character. This entails re-signifying the use of technology, expanding its possibilities through a particular way of looking and of mastering visual depiction.
The political potential of photography, thus, seems to reside in the dealing of the encounter between ever-developing technologies and visual traditions. For in the end, photography’s indexicality was, and still is, the primacy of the medium, even if one sets to challenge it. As an aporetically indexical medium, photography’s potential resides, this way in its hermeneutics. In this, photography is, from start, an intersubjective medium. In order for a photograph to be, it demands a subject, a photographer, and a viewer. The historical experience of a photograph is the kind which is most explicitly open, because it problematizes not its position in the production relation of ITS times, as Benjamin states in his essay, but its position ‘in the production relations of OUR time’, as Boris Buden (2014, p.2) observed. This means, this way, that beyond the historical details which entailed the production of one or other photographic work, it matters looking at this context in our own time.
The attempt to understand the photographer as a producer resides, finally, in inquiring questions similar to those asked by Benjamin in his never professed 1934 speech. Is it possible to the photographer to side with progressive forces of society? Is it possible to assume a correct position in the production relations of our time? If joining the commodity market game is inevitable in this our post-industrial, speculative capital economy, should this mean, nonetheless, giving in to seductive forces of easy, didactic indexical representation, that heritage left by modern Realism so criticised by George Grosz? Should we, for instance, deliver ourselves to the mystification of poverty, and idealization of the proletariat by convention representation as we see in Salgados’s photographs? I don’t believe so. Though it is difficult to free ourselves from photography’s indexicality, it seems, following Benjamin, that the principle of a progressive photography should be that of embracing the transitory nature of phenomena depicted.
To oppose the all-too-powerful role of symbolism, like the visual depiction of the Bourgeois and of the Proletarian in realist art, with the anti-aesthetic strength of allegory. Not to not represent but, as Brecht observed, to represent in a correct manner. To operate the distance between viewer and image, to situate them on a threshold, free from the easy metaphor of political representation, but to denounce the perils of political representation and make clear the process through which photography represents. If the correct tendency of the left should be that of opposing the aesthetization of politics with the politicization of aesthetics, this cannot be done by mystification of its own ideals, but rather, by making explicit the transitoriness of its nature through a self-reflective form of aesthetic representation. This involves looking anew, looking differently, learning to look, knowing where we are looking from.
References
[endif]--Benjamin, W. (2005a). The Author as Producer. In M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, & G. Smith (Eds.), Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. (Vol. 2, part 2, 1931-1934). Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press.![endif]--
Benjamin, W. (2005b). Little History of Photography. In M. W. Jennings;, H. Eiland;, & G. Smith (Eds.), Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings (Vol. 2, part 2, 1931-1934). Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press.
Brecht, B. (1970). Diálogo Sôbre a Arte de Representar. In L. C. Maciel (Ed.), Teatro Dialético. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.
Buck-Morss, S. (1992). Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Reconsidered. October, 62((Autumn)), 3-41.
Buden, B. (2004). Re-reading Benjamin's "Author as Producer" in the Post-Communist East. Transversal - eipcp multilingual webjournal., 12. Retrieved from http://eipcp.net/transversal/1204/buden/en
Köhn, E. (Ed.) (2006). Benjamin Handbuch. LebenWerk-Wirkung. Stuttgart; Weimar: J.B. Metzler.
Stopford, J. (1990). The Deat of the Author (as Producer). Philosophy and Rhetoric, 23(3), 181-194.
[1] ... gegenständlich Material, das sich durch Vergrößerung erschließt … Der Sichtbarmachung einer von menschlichem Bewusstsein nicht wahrnehmbaren Formenwelt der Oberfläche.
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