Progress

For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”)

In the epilogue to his now canonical 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin states: “The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values” (“The Work of Art” 241). Benjamin goes on to explain that the cult value of a work of art is maintained through its ritualistic function which transforms it into an authoritative and authentic instrument of “magic.” Such perception of the work of art—as a tool—limits its functionality to that of the apparatus for which it was forged. Similarly, the exhibition value of a work of art requires it be stripped of all particularized ritualistic functions and—having no “use”—it becomes absorbed by the prevailing political apparatus.  The problem in both cases is that the work of art is forged within and contained by an aesthetic of war. This aesthetic of war, which through the escalating force of technology creates a sense perception whose goal demands on the largest scale that the work of art be ultimately realized in the art of war—“Fiat ars—pereat mundus”—“l’art pour l’art”—uses death as its medium, mass movement as its mode, and the upholding of the property system as its mode.[1]  The exhibition of revolutionary art, which is part and parcel to the aesthetics of war, supplies a space wherein those who remain feel they are allowed the freedom to express their individual outrage politically, all the while no more capable of breaching the walls of Fascism than the murals that adorn them.

As an alternative, Benjamin provides architecture as an artistic medium through which one might locate a means of modifying the prevailing aesthetic by modifying the human apparatus of perception.  However, even architecture falls into the aesthetic of war as long as it is deemed valuable and is appropriated by the economic system, so in The Arcades Project, he turns his attention to a peculiar architectural construction—the Parisian passages—as a means of locating a structural guide for a kind of generative thought that “is totally useless for fascism” (“Work of Art” 218). In The Arcades Project, this apparatus is to be identified with what Benjamin refers to as “the structure of awakening” (The Arcades Project 389 [K1,3]).

Connected to this kind of structure is Benjamin’s figure of the “Author as Producer” as laid out in an address for the Institute of the Study of Fascism (a Communist front organization) in 1934 which he never presented or published in his lifetime. In the address, Benjamin attempts to attend to Ramón Fernandez’ “task” put forth in the essay’s epigraph: “The task is to win over the intellectuals to the working class by making them aware of the identity of their spiritual enterprises and of their conditions as producers” (“The Author as Producer” 768). Benjamin addresses this problem through Plato’s assertion that the poet should be banished from the ideal state, proposing that the author does indeed have the capacity to become producer through technique, the site of Benjamin’s synthesis of form and content. The author’s technique, however, can itself be divided into a new dichotomy, techniques of progression and techniques of regression, which Benjamin identifies, attributing a generative, anti-fascist aesthetic to works of art produced by techniques of progression, which he argues regressive techniques throw over in favor of upholding tradition.  His essay not only proposes a new means of enacting change through writing, it also proposes a new way of looking at progress—not as the carrying out of a plan designed to attain a preconceived goal—but as a deft and improvisational passage through and manipulation of imminent structures.

Benjamin asserts in “The Author as Producer” that “a political tendency, however revolutionary it may seem, has a counterrevolutionary function so long as the writer feels his solidarity with the proletariat only in his attitudes, not as a producer” (“Author as Producer” 772).  The escape Benjamin sees from the regressive or revolutionary trap “consists in the conduct that transforms him from a supplier of the productive apparatus, into an engineer, who sees it as his task to adapt this apparatus” (“Author as Producer” 780). This conduct—or method—involves the mastering and manipulating of technologies of perception—be they linguistic or otherwise—in order to “recast” the literary forms, “for technical progress is for the author as producer the foundation of his political progress” (“Author as Producer” Selected Writings Vol. 2,775); and it is in learning how to work the latest technological systems that authors might modify the structure and in doing so, like architects, alter the “habitual course” of their reader's appropriation of content (“Author as Producer” 779).

One needn’t look too hard to see the manner in which revolutionary art merely exchanges the terms of Fascism for those of personalized outrage, or that it uses the same terms in order to reenact or reproduce the fascist mode by simply reversing its direction.  The oppressed becomes the oppressor and gains ground until it too must be overturned in the cycle.  By the time “The Work of Art” essay was written, the art world had become overrun with manifestos—all of them owing a debt to The Communist Manifesto, all supplanting the totalizing structure of their perceived oppressors with remarkably similar ones anchored in critiques that maintain fascist systems as their nemeses.  With only subtle variation, the return of these revolutionaries to moralizing frameworks as the primary means of their “opposition” results in the imposition of dictates—rules and their terms—on the creative acts forged by their members. Each dictate branches off to form new lexicons, new structures, new biases, etc., all, while productive, failing yet again to escape the prevailing oppressive value structures against which they were so passionately allied. 

Take, for example, the following extractions from some of revolutionary art’s more prominent figure heads:  Marinetti’s 1909 The Futurist Manifesto, item 9: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, the beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn woman” (Modernism 251); Pound and Lewis’ 1914 Vorticist Manifesto from Blast, part 6, item 1: “The Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius,—its appearance and its spirit” (Modernism 293);  Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada Manifesto: “Every man must shout: there is great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep to clean” (Modernism 279); Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism: “The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights” (Modernism 308); Walsh’s 1925 editorial preface to This Quarter: “We are not hosts to a polite gathering at the tea-cups. We are rather the camp of an army on the march” (Walsh np); and transition magazine’s 1929 “Manifesto for ‘The Revolution of the Word’” item 3: “PURE POETRY IS A LYRICAL ABSOLUTE THAT SEEKS AN A PRIORI REALITY WITHIN OURSELVES ALONE” (“Manifesto” np). While each “movement” attempts to break from the so-called fascist order of unimpressed publishers, dismissive reading populations, and scornful academics ascribing different particularized rules and terms in place of those that serve as the vexing objects of their critique, technically they are remarkably similar to those which their authors oppose:  egotistic calls to a war in which imagination asserts itself as a lyrical absolute through a univocal multi-membered army on the march. The aesthetic is still the aesthetic of war, and the initial mode of operation that underlies the impetus for its construction as a mechanism of rebellion is reproduced. 

The aforementioned quotations, while different in the particulars of their revolutionary attempts, all similarly put to use the structure of the manifesto, a form which takes contagion as its mode and self-replication as its goal. Each movement sets forth a program for artistic production which more often than not assumes the form of a series of proverbial dictates. This program is laid out in advance and serves as the structure designed to contain “real” or better art.  Most importantly, the “real” better art that results from any adherence to these preformed principles will also replicate the apparatus of its conception in hopes of further propagating the movement to the point of dominion and mass appeal.  It must be public to be political, after all.  Their outrage and revolutionary spiritedness, their hostility toward outsiders, dissenters, critics and would-be fugitives, their unchecked use of shock value and their tenuous conceptual foundations (to say nothing of their ethnocentricity, misogyny, and zealotry) succeed only in exercising the expressive function their oppressive construct has set aside expressly for them. Just as Baudrillard’s “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” (Baudrillard 13) and in thereby doing “saving the reality principle” (Baudrillard 13), the revolutionary manifesto, which gleans all use value through the process of exhibition, saves the revolutionary principle, in no way altering the system it critiques. Thus this kind of “revolutionary” writing keeps its readers at an optic distance, packaging its dictates as freedom and confining its readers to the tactile instruction of the very same system in which it was conceived and which it was conceived to overthrow.  Progressive writing, on the other hand, does not reproduce prevailing structures, instead refashioning the apparatus of its making in order to forge new structures that awaken—give rise to—new habits of reading, the resulting tactile lessons emerging from navigation of the refashioned apparatus. What this progressive structure provides is a generative art form that encourages its readers “[t]o pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream” (The Arcades Project 389 [K1,2]).

There is one document from the list above that gestures toward a progressive mode of writing though falling short of the texts that combine to forge its structural apparatus.  The “Manifesto for ‘The Revolution of the Word,” attempts to breach the obvious link between its own rules and the rules of “the oppressor,” by summoning the revolutionary ethos of artist/poet William Blake, whose biography aligns his work with the revolutionary history of the Moravians, their heretical debt to Jan Huss, as well as the thinking of the leading intellectual dissidents in England during his lifetime, and whose lifework ruminates on the subject and figures of rebellion.  Consider the text itself:

PROCLAMATION      TIRED OF THE SPECTACLE OF SHORT STORIES, NOVELS, POEMS AND PLAYS STILL UNDER THE HEGEMONY OF THE BANAL WORD, MONOTNOUS SYNTAX, STATIC PSYCHOLOGY, DESCRIPTIVE NATURALISM, AND DESIROUS OF CRYSTALLIZING A VIEWPOINT. . .      WE HEREBY DECREE THAT: 1.      THE REVOLUTION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS AN ACCOMPLISHED FACT. 2.      THE IMAGINATION IN SEARCH OF A FABULOUS WORLD IS AUTONOMOUS AND UNCONFINED.                           (Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity…Blake) 3.        PURE POETRY IS A LYRICAL ABSOLUTE THAT SEEKS AN A PRIORI REALITY WITHIN OURSELVES ALONE.                          (Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth…Blake) 4.        NARRATIVE IS NOT MERE ANECDOTE, BUT THE PROJECTION OF A METAMORPHOSIS OF REALITY.                                                                          (Enough or too much !…Blake) 5.        THE EXPRESSION OF THESE CONCEPTS CAN BE ACHIEVED ONLY THROUGH THE RHYTHMIC “HALLUCINATION OF THE WORD”. (Rimbaud). 6.        THE LITERARY CREATOR HAS THE RIGHT TO DISINTEGRATE THE PRIMAL MATTER OF WORDS IMPOSED ON HIM BY THE TEXT-BOOKS AND DICTIONARIES.                            (The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom …Blake) 7.        HE HAS THE RIGHT TO USE WORDS OF HIS OWN FASHIONING AND TO DISREGARD EXISTING GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL LAWS.              (The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction…Blake) 8.        THE “LITANY OF WORDS” IS ADMITTED AS AN INDEPENDEDNT UNIT. 9.        WE ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH THE PROPAGATION OF SOCIOLOGICAL IDEAS, EXCEPT TO EMANCIPATE THE CREATIVE ELEMENTS FROM THE PRESENT IDEOLOGY. 10.     TIME IS A TYRANNY TO BE ABOLISHED. 11.     THE WRITER EXPRESSES. HE DOES NOT COMMUNICATE. 12.     THE PLAIN READER BE DAMNED.                                                                                                          (Damn braces ! Bless relaxes !…Blake)       --Signed: KAY BOYLE, WHITE BURNETT, HART CRANE, CARESSE CROSBY, HARRY CROSBY,  MARTHA FOLEY, STUART GILBERT, A. L. GILLESIE, LEIGH HOFFMAN, EUGENE JOLAS, ELLIOT PAUL, DOUGLAS RIGBY, THEO RUTRA, ROBERT SAGE, HAROLD J. SALEMSON, LAURENCE VAIL.