1

(From Marxism and Film by Gary Zabel. All rights reserved.)

Chapter 1: Marx and the Coming of Cinema

Phantasmagoria

Marx was familiar with still photography. Quite a few studio portraits of Marx, his wife, and his children still exist, as well as one photograph taken outdoors. The outdoor photo shows Marx’s three daughters – Caroline, Laura, and Eleanor – seated in the foreground, with Marx and Engels standing behind them. The men as well as the girls are dressed in their Victorian Sunday best, the girls wearing hats pinned with flowers, and Marx holding his big round-brimmed hat in his hand. A white picket fence is visible in the background, while a dappled, sunlit gap in the thick foliage behind it divides the image in half, with Marx and Caroline on the right-hand side, and Engels, Laura, and Eleanor on the left. If we did not know better, we might mistake the group of five for a family (with Engels, perhaps, as the uncle) on a picnic or some other outing after having attended church. The hair on Marx’s head is grey, and his black beard sports two triangular grey tufts, one on each side of its bottom edge. He is no longer a young man. Photography was invented between 1822 and 1837, the span of time extending from Niepce’s use of a camera obscura to create the first photo-etching to Daguerre’s invention of the daguerreotype. Judging by the apparent ages of its subjects, the outdoor photograph dates from the mid-1860s. Marx was in exile in London at the time, and nearly fifty years old. He was close to publishing the first volume of his masterwork, Capital.

The technology of still photography was a necessary prerequisite of cinema.1 Before video and digital imaging, cinema required the use of a camera to focus light on a surface coated in a chemically sensitive emulsion, and the fixation, by chemical means, of the resulting image on a second light-sensitive surface. But, obviously, there is more to cinema than photographic technology. Three further technical developments were necessary for its creation. The first was the invention of a material medium for recording and printing images that was flexible enough to be wound on a reel or some other feeding device, and sturdy enough to resist degradation by motion. The medium that won out over competing candidates was celluloid cut into thin, translucent strips. The second development consisted in the invention of a source of illumination stronger and steadier than a candle flame, a light source that became available with the invention of the incandescent bulb (though it was soon replaced by the carbon arc). These two breakthroughs occurred in the United States, each an invention of Thomas Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. The third development was rather complex, and

2

is credited to more than one inventor. Motion pictures required a method for generating mechanical motion, and conveying that motion at a uniform speed to a flexible celluloid strip gently enough to avoid tearing it. To begin with, the light-sensitive strip had to be exposed, frame-by-frame, to light focused by the lens of a camera. After the first strip was developed and a print made, the print, also in the form of a celluloid strip, had to be fed through a projector at the same speed that the original strip moved through the camera (initially sixteen frames per second, now twenty-four frames per second). This in turn required a source of power, a method of converting the power into uniform motion, a device for conveying that motion to the celluloid strip while guiding its path before the illumination source, and finally a means of projecting the images in sequence onto a screen. In competition with one another, Edison and his staff in the United States, the Lumière Brothers and their staff in France, and a number of unaffiliated inventors solved the technical problems involved. First, they used hand-cranked motors as the power source for cameras and projectors (though the Edison lab also invented an electrically driven, though stationary, camera and projector), while developing gear arrangements that both transmitted and stabilized the motion generated by the motors. Second, they developed mechanical “claws” and similar devices to grip sprockets cut into the edges of the celluloid strip, allowing it to be fed past camera lens on the one hand, and projector illumination source on the other. Third, they developed a combination of lens and shutter, permitting the exposure and projection of images frame-by-frame necessary for creating the illusion of motion. The inventions were all in place between 1895 and 1896. By that time Marx had been dead for twelve years.

Even though Marx did not live to see the invention of cinema, he was familiar with some of its precursors. Having lived at various times in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and London, he was exposed to the new forms of mass entertainment being developed for the urban populations that were growing as the Industrial Revolution progressed. While cinema was to become the dominant form of mass entertainment in the early years of the twentieth century, it was preceded in the nineteenth by an incredible array of devices for entertaining the public with moving images, devices with equally incredible names: fantascopes, praxinoscopes, thaumatropes, zoetropes, zoopraxinoscopes – a flourishing technological menagerie. One such device, widespread in the nineteenth century, though invented in the early eighteenth, was used to create a kind of ghostly theater known as the phantasmagoria. The phantasmagorical projector was a modified magic lantern set on wheels. It projected images from translucent slides onto opaque or semi-transparent surfaces, and sometimes onto an insubstantial medium, such as a cloud of smoke. The images were normally of ghosts, skeletons, demons, and the magicians who conjured them while standing in protective magical circles. The fact that the projector was mounted on wheels enabled its operator to set the images in motion by changing the projector’s position during the show. With the use of multiple projectors, special effects were possible, including transformations of one image into another, an effect the early Soviet directors were to use in the next century, though with a different, specifically cinematic technology.

Marx makes use of the phantasmagoria in his famous discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Capital, Volume 1 (Marx 1992, 163-177). The book begins with an analysis of the commodity as the cellular unit of capitalism, its simplest, most basic expression. Commodities exist in societies prior to capitalism, but do not dominate them,

3

especially since labor and land rarely exchange on pre-capitalist markets. Capitalism emerges from its historical predecessors precisely by breaking traditional barriers to market exchange, thereby universalizing the commodity-form. Marx uses the word "fetishism" in this context to refer to an inversion that occurs in the relationship between commodities and their producers. Human beings are the makers of commodities, but are ruled by what they have made, just as the worshipper of a fetish is ruled by an object made by human hands. More specifically, in commodity fetishism, the creators of commodities are dominated by the movement of their own creations on the market.

Consider an example Marx does not use, but that is nevertheless illuminating, that of runners on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The runners are puppets whose strings are pulled by commodities, in the sense that the physical movements of the runners are controlled by the varying ratios in which stocks exchange against one another, as reflected in their changing prices. Every change in the numbers on the Big Board sends human bodies flying off in different directions, or at least did so prior to the widespread use of computers. But the example, while vivid, is also misleading. The runners are not the producers of the commodities whose values the stock prices represent. In Marx’s analysis, however, the values of commodities are determined by the process of their production, specifically by the units of time socially necessary to produce them.

A commodity is an object meant for exchange. It differs in this respect from an object meant for use. Accordingly, for Marx, the labor that produces a commodity is different than the qualitatively distinctive labor that creates objects for the purpose of satisfying human needs. Commodity-producing labor is not the specific work of the plumber, the weaver, the carpenter, the miner, and so on, but merely a definite part of the whole mass of labor of average quality and productivity available to society. The value of a commodity is just that part of the totality of social labor, considered as a homogenous resource, necessary to produce the commodity. So, for example, if it requires the expenditure of two hours of average labor to produce a pair of shoes, and only one hour to produce a toaster, then the value of one pair of shoes will be embodied in two toasters, and so one pair of shoes will exchange for two toasters. But – and here is the crucial point – in a society based on commodity exchange, the determination of values by socially necessary labor time operates behind the backs of the producers. These values seem to be the mysterious properties of the commodities themselves, as exhibited in their market behavior. It is in this sense that the commodities are “fetishes,” inanimate objects that seem to be endowed with occult powers, and to interact with other commodities of their own accord. In Marx's view, as long as human beings fail to regulate their relations with one another by consciously apportioning their labor in accordance with a plan, their social relations inevitably take on the appearance of relations between things. The phantasmagoria makes its appearance at this point in Marx's discussion. He writes:

It is nothing but the definite social relationship between men themselves which here assumes, for them, the phantasmagorical form of a relationship of things (Marx 1992, 165). 2 Could Marx have chosen a different adjective than phantasmagorical

(phantasmagorische) – ghostly (geisterhaft), for example – and not have substantially weakened the metaphor as a result? Probably not. By basing the metaphor on a show of

4

illusory moving images produced by a technical apparatus, Marx points to, not only the images themselves, but also the machinery responsible for their appearance. This corresponds to the theoretical purpose of his discussion of commodity fetishism, which is to uncover the mechanism that produces the illusory appearance of the commodity as fetish, as something that seems to be mysteriously endowed with a life of its own.

The phantasmagoria of commodities came to play a celebrated role in discussions of Marxist aesthetics just before the outbreak of the Second World War, in an exchange of letters between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. We will examine that correspondence in greater detail further on. At this point, it is sufficient to note that Marx lived at a time when cinema was in the air, even though it had not yet been invented, and that the technology of moving images that preceded cinema played a role in one of his most important theoretical discussions.

Beyond the metaphor of the phantasmagoria, Marx’s writings, considered as a whole, provide us with five ways of conceptualizing cinema. They invite us to conceive of cinema as a type of industry, as a vehicle of ideology, as a form of art, as a cultural expression of the commodity-form, and as a medium of dialectical development. We will consider each of these modes of conceptualization in turn.

Cinema as Industry

It is common to talk about the “movie industry,” but not so common to use that phrase with the seriousness it deserves. Cinema is an industry, not merely in the general sense that it is a sector of economic activity (like the fishing industry, for example), but in the specific sense that it is a process of industrial production. We have already seen that the invention of cinema required advances in the electrical and chemical industries, including incandescent light bulbs and translucent celluloid strips, to which we might add the machine-made parts used in motors. Cinema is possible only if a larger industrial system is already in place, and a relatively advanced system at that. The movies have their origin in the era of electricity and chemicals, not in the epoch of the steam engine and the power loom. They are the product of the Second Industrial Revolution, not the First. But the fact that cinema is embedded in a more comprehensive and relatively advanced industrial system is not the only thing that makes it an industry. Considered by itself, cinema also exhibits the technical structure of an industrial process.

In Capital, Volume 1, Marx distinguishes what he calls "modern industry" from the stage of manufacture that precedes it (Marx 1992, 454-491). As the earliest form of the factory system, manufacture arises when an owner of capital assembles traditional craft workers under a common roof, while supplying them with the tools and raw materials necessary to ply their trade, and a wage in exchange for the products they make. When manufacture first appears, each craft worker makes a finished product, just as he did in traditional guild production. In distinction from the guild system, however, the capitalist instead of the craftsman owns that product. As manufacture develops, the owner of capital introduces into the factory a division of labor in which each worker specializes in a single part of the whole production process. Instead of making a finished product, the worker now performs only a part of the work necessary to produce it. As a specialist in a single operation, the manufacturing worker is able to execute the assigned task in a

5

shorter period of time than his or her predecessor, who carried out the whole series of operations necessary to make the product. The productivity of labor increases as a result of such specialization. When productivity increases take hold of the consumer goods industries, they reduce the wage bill per unit of output, and so cheapen the cost of the items necessary for the workers' subsistence. In other words, the value, and therefore the price, of consumer goods fall. This permits reduction in the real wage in all industries, since workers can now survive at a lower cost, and a corresponding increase in the profits that accrue to the capitalists who own those industries. Still, such increases in productivity are restricted by biology. The division of labor alone is unable to press beyond the limited energy, speed, and accuracy of the human body. The substitution of machinery for human beings removes such inherent biological limitations.

For Marx, the machine has a tripartite character that distinguishes it from the simple tool (Marx 1992, 494). Every machine consists in a source of motive power, a transmission mechanism, and a tool, or more likely, multiple tools operated by the machine rather than the worker. The division of labor that made human beings one-sided appendages of the organized labor process in manufacture reaches its ultimate expression in mechanized industry, especially when mechanization proceeds to the point where multiple machines are driven by a single power source, to which they are connected by a unified, factory-wide transmission mechanism. At this stage of development, the machines are arranged in a series in which material is processed sequentially. Raw material is processed by the first machine; the partially processed material is handed off to the second machine, which conducts a higher level of processing; then it is fed into a third machine for even more advanced processing, and so on, until the final machine completes its task, resulting in the finished product. Marx calls such a system an “automaton,” in reference to its self-moving nature. The system is a form of “perpetual motion” able to shape matter on scales grand and small, while vastly multiplying the number of products that can be turned out in a given period of time. It is, in Marx’s words, a “demonic” assemblage of processes that reduces workers to the level of appendages of the self-moving system of mechanized production Workers no longer transform raw materials into a finished product, but rather feed those materials to the mechanical “monsters” – another of Marx’s expressions –, service the machines, and correct their errors (Marx 1992, 502-503). Here the inversion in the relationship between human makers and their products that Marx analyzed under the abstract rubric of commodity fetishism becomes physically substantial. The relations between workers in the mechanized productive process take on the phantasmagorical form of relations between machines.

The film industry approximates to this description, but does not completely conform to it. It is not a form of fully mechanized production, but rather a partially mechanized industry with significant craft elements. Cameras, light meters, dollies, microphones, sound recording devices, sound mixers, continuous film processors, printers, film synchronizers, film splicers, and projectors are all machines in use in the film industry, at least in the contemporary period. Moreover, as in fully mechanized factory production, these machines perform their operations sequentially, in an order determined by the technical requirements involved in proceeding from raw material to finished product. The film as raw material must first acquire the latent images that result from photographic exposure (cameras, light meters, and dollies). The exposed film must be developed

6

(continuous film processors) and then printed (printers) in order to make the latent images visually explicit. At this point, the film, in the sense of the sequence of visual images recorded by the camera, can be edited (film synchronizers, film splicers), and paired with a sound track, itself constructed by "mixing" sounds, whether synchronously or asynchronously recorded (microphones, sound recording devices, mixers). Only then can the filmmaker arrange for the distribution and projection (projectors) of the release print.

The mechanized workflow is similar to that of the modern factory, with the important proviso that the filmmaker is not an appendage of an automated process. This is because the process cannot be fully automated. The filmmaker must exercise craft and sometimes artistic judgment in shooting and editing the film. Even in such cases of experimental filmmaking as Michael Snow's The Central Region, where the camera is attached to a programmed robotic arm, the decision to automate the camera is the result of an aesthetic choice on the part of the filmmaker, rather than a technical demand of the production process.

The craft element involved in making movies is most pronounced in the case of the independent filmmaker working on a small budget. With limited financial means (though sometimes as a matter of choice), the filmmaker may perform all of the various tasks that are divided among specialized workers in better-funded and more conventional forms of film production. The independent filmmaker may act as producer, director, cinematographer, camera operator, sound engineer, editor, and even distributor, so that he or she is the sole maker of a single, integrated product. This is precisely what characterizes craftwork in the earliest stage of manufacture, before the division of labor confines workers to a single part of what was once a unitary process of making.

Even when better financed and more conventional filmmaking occurs, the division of labor between producer, director, cinematographer, camera operator, and so on fails to abolish the craft-like faculty of sensitive, discerning judgment that is necessary for performing even specialized tasks, and that must be acquired over long periods of training and practical experience. The continuing existence of guilds and apprenticeships in the film industry indicates as much. Directors generally start as assistant directors, editors as assistant editors, and camera operators as camera assistants. Something of the old master-journeyman relationship is preserved in this way. But now we are closer to the second period in the development of manufacture, where the traditional crafts are fragmented into partial crafts, each of which, nevertheless, requires the mentality of a craftsman rather than that of a machine tender.

What is fascinating about the crafts of the film industry is that they involve the operation of machines. The machine replaces the tool as the instrument of craftwork. This is a momentous development in the history of art, because it breaks with the manual character that the visual arts retained even after Renaissance artists succeeded in their bid to achieve a status similar to that of scholars, poets, and musicians. What we might call “the collective filmmaker” (on analogy with Marx’s phrase, “the collective worker”) is freed from the necessity of working on raw material with its organic, bodily appendages. The tool communicates bodily motion to raw material in the act of shaping it, but the machine intervenes between bodies and the material that must be worked. The collective filmmaker deploys, adjusts, and operates machines with all the sensitive discernment of craft skill, but the machines are the agents that move, stage-by-stage, from unexposed

7

film to release print. Moreover, just as in fully mechanized factory production, the result of the process of film production is not a single product, but a vast number of products; in this case, a vast number of copies of the release print.

Each copy of the print is a commodity, an object meant for exchange. More precisely, each viewing of the print by a member of the movie theater audience is a commodity, since the price of admission exchanges for the opportunity to view the print. The sum of the prices of all theater tickets (and DVDs, etc.) sold for a particular film constitutes gross receipts. The film, Avatar, now holds the record at nearly three billion dollars in gross theater receipts alone. When the costs of production are subtracted from gross receipts, the profit that accrues to the film’s investors remains. What drives the movie industry is, of course, the desire to maximize profits, the same imperative that drives all capitalist industry. Avant-garde film and experimental film exist in the margins of this system, supported by grants, visiting artist fellowships, and a handful of small investors, often including the filmmakers themselves. Famously, Michael Moore sold his bed in order to fund his first film, Roger and Me.

In the commercial, profit-maximizing movie industry, the key to economic success is the number of tickets and home viewing opportunities sold. But large audiences are attracted by expensive movie stars and high visual and auditory production values, so that the biggest box office hits require substantial investment funds. Avatar cost around 300 million dollars to make, and around 150 million to promote.3 Considerable investment capital was risked, in this case at a rate of profit far higher than that of other industries. In order to reduce risk, investors must be able to control the factors that enable a film project to make money. This includes, not only substantial outlays on promotion, but also a considerable amount of market research. The result is normally a formulaic standardization of film content; reliance upon what has worked in the past. Innovation is more likely to be technical than artistic in character. The main reason for Avatar’s success is its highly sophisticated use of 3D and artificial life technologies. Its narrative, on the other hand, is quite formulaic, even though it involves more than one formula. It is a love story embedded in a futuristic version of the “New Western.”

Theodor Adorno was the first thinker in the Marxist tradition to discuss the standardization of the film commodity by introducing the concept of the culture industry in a book he wrote with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in 1944 (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 120-167). He offered the concept as a replacement for the idea of popular culture by pointing out that movies, radio programs, hit songs, and so on are not creations of the people at all, but rather the products of giant economic concerns. In 1944, Adorno was living in Hollywood, and even attending Hollywood parties. He collaborated with the composer, Hans Eisler, on a book titled, Composing for

Film. To some extent, he was able to observe the film industry from the inside. What he saw was the mass production of standardized products, like automobiles coming off an assembly line. Variations in film prototypes are like car models, different enough to intrigue the consumer, but essentially marginal variations on a single theme. Ease of reception guides standardization in film, like standardization in other branches of the culture industry. Since the mass audience turns to film as a form of entertainment, and thus as a respite from alienated work, it rejects anything that requires an effort of understanding. According to Adorno, this consumer demand is not “natural;” it is created by the pressures of capitalism in the form of the mental and physical exhaustion of the

8

working day. By meeting the demand for effortless entertainment, the film industry produces a kind of pleasure that ties the mass audience to the very system that exhausts them in the work process, thereby generating the need for effortless entertainment in the first place. In so doing, it encourages and deepens a psychological infantilism that incorporates the film audience even more securely into the dominant social order.

It is easy to point out the limitations of this analysis by referring to the mental activity that watching Hollywood film involves. D.W. Griffith challenged the film audience with his use of montage, no matter how regressive or downright racist Birth of a

Nation might be. Part of the pleasure that comes from watching the Big Sleep lies in the cognitive effort required to follow its enormously difficult, and not fully coherent, plot. Still, it is hard to deny the element of truth in Adorno’s critique of standardization and psychological regression in mainstream film. The movies emerged at the same time as the mass audience, both born from the advance of capitalist industry. The fetishism of commodity production and exchange penetrates into the substance of film by shaping it in accordance with an idea of what is saleable, and so capable of generating profit. It is simply obvious that the most aesthetically advanced films are not the ones that triumph at the box office. This is what the currently fashionable populism of Slavoj Zizek’s film criticism misses, a form of criticism that finds something worthwhile even in Sparta

300’s celebration of the most brutal forms of military discipline (Zizek 2011). Marx’s analysis of the nature of industry and the fetishistic commodity it produces suggests a theory of film much closer to Adorno’s supposed elitism than Zizek’s sometimes-regressive populism.

Capitalist industry involves the mass production of commodities, not only for the domestic market, but for the world market as well. According to Marx, the world market originates in the earliest period in the history of capitalism, the period of “primitive accumulation" that begins in the fifteenth century. Four interconnected processes characterize this epoch that lays the foundation of the new mode of production and exchange. First, the English peasantry is uprooted as lords enclose the commons, bringing what was once a collective resource into their private possession in order to graze sheep for the international market in wool. The displaced peasants migrate from the countryside to the cities, where their descendants are recruited into the new proletariat when industrialization begins in the eighteenth century. Second, the Spanish conquer Mexico and Peru, extracting their gold and silver and transferring them to Spain, in the process inaugurating the destruction of millions of Amerindians. Third, the near genocide in the Americas creates a demand for slaves that the Portuguese are the first to meet because of their early presence in West Africa. Fourth, the Portuguese inaugurate the European penetration of Asia by beginning the colonization of India. Collectively, these four processes involve the movement of goods and human bodies from country to country and continent to continent, along paths of exchange made possible in large part by the conversion of American gold and silver into currency. The global market thus has its origin in massive theft, war, conquest, and genocidal extermination. In Marx's own words:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, the conversion of Africa into a

9

preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production (Marx 1992, 915). The forgoing account of the sanguinary origins of the world market is from the

eighth chapter of Capital, Volume 1. Marx’s earlier treatment of the rise of the global market in the Communist Manifesto is more positive, even enthusiastic, in tone. It is part of what we can only regard as his homage to the bourgeoisie. All earlier ruling classes, Marx tells us, were concerned with preserving the old forms of production and the social relations connected with them, and so were essentially conservative. By contrast, the bourgeoisie “has played a most revolutionary part” (Marx and Engels 2012, 37). The Manifesto attributes this revolutionary role to the reciprocally augmenting forces of industry and the world market. The discovery of America and the opening of a sea route to Asia were the beginnings of global exchange, which stimulated the growth of commerce, navigation, and industry in the early form of manufacture. The resulting increase in the production of commodities in turn required the expansion of the global market, and that provided the impetus for a further increase in industrial production. The result was mechanized industry, and the even greater expansion of the world market that was necessary to absorb its products:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere (Marx and Engels 2012, 39). The bourgeoisie crosses the boundaries that separate region from region, country

from country, and continent from continent, giving production and consumption a cosmopolitan character. Without regard for religion, language, or local tradition, its commodities break through the barriers that separate one part of humankind from another, demolishing the parochial limits within which societies formerly dwelled. Even the arts lose their restricted, national orientation:

The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature (Marx and Engels 2012, 39). Nowhere is such cosmopolitanism more apparent than in the art form that is born in

the industrial era. From its dual beginnings in France and the United States down to the present day, cinema has been produced for a world market. Less than five years after the invention of cinema, movies were already being filmed and exhibited outside France by the Lumière Brothers, who sent their cameramen and business representatives to the four corners of the planet. Silent movies were especially easy to market globally, because only a handful of intertitles needed to be translated for each film. Witness the enormous appeal the physical comedy of Chaplin’s movies had across national borders prior to the Second World War. Directors in particular have been bound together transnationally, as indicated, for example, by the role D.W. Griffith played at the origin of Soviet film, and

10

the reciprocal influence of Soviet film on American and British directors. But movies are not innocent travelers on the circuits of global exchange. As the U.S. rose to preeminence after the Second World War, so did the American film industry conquer the world market. Even today, after the emergence of important film industries in India, China, Brazil, Iran, Thailand, Cuba, and elsewhere, Hollywood movies draw huge audiences, and commensurate box office receipts, whenever they are screened in these countries. The cultural domination by Hollywood cinema of much of what used to be called the “Third World” is reflected in the surprising discovery by some new immigrants to the United States that its streets are not paved with gold. American movies are ideological as well as economic emissaries to other countries.

The revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie is enacted in the positive feedback loop between the expansion of the world market and the development of industry. These two processes stimulate one another to an ever-accelerating transformation of the conditions of human life. Recited in the style of a religious hymn in the British film comedy, Morgan, a famous passage of the Manifesto reads:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Marx and Engels 2012, 38-39). It should not surprise us that the dominant art form of the twentieth and now twenty-

first centuries is an art of motion, transition, and change. The incessant transformation of images that is, in the final analysis, the product of filmmaking, is a privileged medium for expressing the unending transformation of the conditions of life by capitalist industry and the world market with which it is paired.

Cinema as Ideology

Marx’s concept of ideology is very different than that of such pioneers of academic sociology as Émile Durkheim (Durkheim 1985) and Karl Manheim (Manheim 1995). It also differs in fundamental ways from the concept of ideology Louis Althusser developed in the 1960s and 1970s, which is a Marxist concept in the sense that it addresses itself to problems raised in the Marxist tradition, though it is certainly not that of Marx himself (Althusser, 2008). From the viewpoints of Durkheim, Manheim, and Althusser, ideologies are systems of normative thought – that is, systems that influence human action (religion, morality, law, politics, etc.) – that must be accepted by the members of a social group in order to guarantee its cohesion. For all three, there can be no society without an ideology that acts as its “cement,” and this would hold even for a fully developed communist society. For Marx, however, the purpose of ideology is to insure, not group cohesion, but the political, economic, and cultural dominance of the ruling

11

class. It follows that a classless society – i.e. communism – would have no place for ideology. However, if ideology is not a social cement, neither is it a conspiratorial instrument. In Marx’s view, ideologies are systems of normative ideas that have cognitive content, but that content is a distorted representation of social reality. Such distortion is not the result of a plot by the rulers against the ruled, as Spinoza and many Enlightenment thinkers held.4 Most often, the rulers themselves are taken in by their own ideological distortions. In general, the ruling class believes its ideologies. It does so even when these ideologies are cynical, since, in such cases, the point of cynicism is to affirm the hopelessness of rebellion, and thereby the continued dominance of the ruling class. The unique character of Marx’s concept of ideology, then, lies in its distance from both the sociological-Althusserian concept of ideology as a social cement, and the Spinozist-Enlightenment concept of ideology as a conspiratorial instrument of the ruling class. But this is merely a negative characterization. We will consider Althusser's theory of ideology in our later treatment of Godard’s films of the 1960s and 1970s, since it directly influenced the work of the Dziga Vertov Group he founded. At this point in the discussion, however, we need to focus on the positive content of the idea of ideology in Marx’s own work.

Marx developed his conception of ideology primarily in a single book that he co-authored with Engels and, after difficulties finding a publisher, abandoned to the “gnawing criticism of the mice,” as he was later to say. In the German Ideology, the authors announce their intention to settle their accounts with a philosophical movement in which they had once played a role, the movement of Left Hegelians.

In the aftermath of his death in 1831, Hegel's followers divided into left and right wings on the basis of their attitude toward religion. (The theologian, David Friedrich Strauss was the first to apply the political metaphor of left and right to Hegel’s posthumous followers).5 Hegel had portrayed his philosophical system as the conceptual medium in which what he called the "Absolute Idea" comes to a fully adequate knowledge of itself in Art, Religion, and Philosophy. However, he was always ambiguous concerning the relationship of this philosophical Absolute to the God of traditional religious belief. On the one hand, he was fascinated by the Christian account of the Incarnation, the mystery of a God who is born as a man, suffers and dies on the cross, and is resurrected to eternal life. He saw it as the glorious symbol of a reality that is "spiritual" (in the unique sense Hegel gave to the term) in that it progresses by overcoming opposition on higher levels of development, and so enriches itself by enduring "the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative" (Hegel 1997, 10). On the other hand, he regarded the story of the Incarnation, along with all other religious stories, as the product of “pictorial thinking” (Vorstellung). Such thinking communicates profound truths to be sure, but in an imaginative, sensuous form. Imagery, however, is tainted by contingency, since the object of imaginary representation always appears as one thing among others, located at some definite and limited place and time. For this reason, pictorial thinking cannot help but depict the infinite depth and power of the Absolute in distorted fashion. Since it is not completely appropriate to its subject matter, pictorial thinking is destined to be superseded by the purely conceptual thought of philosophy. The concept, in Heidegger’s sober phrase, may be "charmless and image-poor," but, for that very reason, according to Hegel, it is the only medium fully adequate for expressing the necessary, eternal, and infinite character of the Absolute Idea.

12

For Hegel, the supersession (Aufhebung) of religion by philosophy has the technical meaning of a negation that at the same time preserves the object negated by lifting it to a higher level of expression. But this eminently dialectical position proved difficult to sustain. For in what sense can religion survive its translation into the language of pure concepts? Is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob really a philosopher's God? Here is where the split among Hegel's followers occurred. The right wing had captured the master's own chair at the University of Berlin with the appointment of Georg Andreas Gabler. Gabler and his supporters emphasized the element of preservation in supersession by interpreting the philosopher's absolute as the God of biblical revelation. The left wing was centered in the so-called Doctors' Club that included Marx and Engels, and that met outside the university in the beer halls of Berlin. Its members emphasized the element of negation in supersession by practicing philosophy as a relentless critique of religious ideas. For them, the true home of the absolute is not God, but human self-consciousness, and it is the task of the philosopher to reveal that truth.

Different figures among the Left Hegelians, or the Young Hegelians, as they were more commonly called, developed approaches to the critique of religion along a continuum that extends from relative moderation to extreme radicalism. Strauss was probably the most moderate in that he never denied the truth of Christianity, or even its social authority. He proposed what would later become known as a "demythologizing" critique, that is, one that would dissolve the irrational form taken by Christian beliefs in order to reveal their rational, humanistic core. Bruno Bauer, on the other end of the continuum, took a radically atheistic position. He saw Christianity, along with all other forms of religion, as a kind of idolatry, a subjugation of humanity by the products of its own mind. The task of a critical philosophy, in Bauer's view, is to fulfill the act by which Moses smashed the golden calf, repeating it in relation to the Hebrew God, the Christian Trinity, and all other figments of the human imagination to which humanity now bends the knee.

Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner are key figures in the history of the concept of ideology because they expanded the focus of the Young Hegelian critique to include systems of ideas in addition to those of religion. Feuerbach launched a critique of Hegelian philosophy itself, and of speculative philosophy in general, for their mystified accounts of mind or spirit (Geist), as an entity that exists independently of the real human being of which it is only a part. Speculative philosophy must be replaced by a “philosophy of the future” that begins with an empirical study of humankind as a natural, sensuous species, a species that eats and loves as well as thinks (Feuerbach: 1966). Stirner went further than Feuerbach in that he turned the light of critique, not just on religion and philosophy, but on any system of ideas that generates norms that guide human behavior, and so subordinates the individual human being, whom Stirner calls the “ego,” to mere abstractions. For him, religious, philosophical, political, legal, and moral ideas are chains that the ego must cast off in its quest for autonomy and self-mastery (Stirner 1982). With Stirner, the Young Hegelian critique of religion becomes a critique of ideology in general. Marx and Engels take this task upon themselves in The German

Ideology, though in a way very different than Stirner. According to Marx (Engels later credited him as the main author of the materialist

theory of history articulated in The German Ideology), the problem with Stirner's account, as well as those of the other Young Hegelians, is that it gives to ideas and

13

liberation from ideas a power that they do not possess. In one of the scathing parodies that seem to crop up at every turn in The German Ideology, Marx compares the Young Hegelians to a man who spends his life attempting to demonstrate that people die by falling into water because they have the idea of gravity in their heads, so that drowning would be prevented if only we could get people to abandon their belief (Marx 1970a, 37). At first glance, the point of the example seems to be that gravity is a physical force that continues to operate whether or not we have the idea of it. Marx would then be arguing a simple realist position, namely, that physical things exist independently of the minds that think about them. But that cannot be Marx's point. Stirner never made the mistake of arguing that the rejection of ideologies would change the physical world. His view, rather, was that, as systems of normative beliefs, ideologies have effects on human behavior, effects that he believed to be baleful. He wanted to eliminate those effects by liberating humankind from religious, political, legal, and moral ideas. In order to defeat Stirner's claims, Marx needs to defend a position quite different than the realist one. He has to show that the forces that keep ideologies in existence are not ideological at all, so that any attempt to dispel ideologies on the level of thought alone is destined for defeat. But these forces are not physical, and so are not "material" in the usual sense of the word. Marx's materialism is not a physicalistic realism, a simple assertion that physical things exist independently of the human mind (though Marx certainly believes that they do). It is a more complex thesis about the genetic primacy of a unique relationship over ideologies – the relationship between the human species and nature.

Marx incorporates this thesis into a revised concept of ideology. For him, the concept involves, not only systems of normative beliefs, but also the false assumption that those systems are independent of the relationship between humankind and nature. Ideology is not only a set of ideas that shape human beings and their actions in a false or alienated way. It is also, and primarily, a false thesis about the independent origin and efficacy of these very ideas. With Marx, the concept of ideology becomes radically reflexive. The purpose of the critique of ideology changes accordingly. It is not so much an unmasking of ideologies as forms of falsification and manipulation, as it is an unmasking of the illusion ideologies have about themselves, in other words, their illusion of autonomy.

This unmasking requires an account of the origin and continuing efficacy of ideologies in the relationship between human beings and what Marx calls "inorganic nature," i.e., nature external to the human organism. In order to survive, human beings must change the objective forms they encounter in nature by reshaping them with the movements of the human body in the activity of work. The human body, which is a product of nature in its evolutionary development, must transform the nature that has given rise to it by exercising its capacities. Such capacities become actual powers in the course of being exercised, and at the same time expand in relation to the new tasks that are posed by a partially transformed external nature. People transform the natural world, which then, as a new environment, transforms the people who have transformed it, who, as thus transformed, transform the natural world once again, and so on in a spiral that will continue as long as there are human beings. Marx describes it as a “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel) between human beings and inorganic nature, an exchange of progressively transformed substances that must go on continually if the species is not to perish (Schmidt 1971, 77-91). The material character of this reciprocal process is thus closer to biology than physics, though it ultimately transcends both disciplines, since the human

14

organisms involved in the process act with purpose and conscious awareness. By so doing, they produce, not just a transformation of nature – as beavers do when they build dams – but a transformation that is historical in that it tends progressively to expand the sphere of meaningful human action. The product of human metabolic activity in relation to nature includes new human capacities as well as an altered natural world, and both are handed down to the next generation as material to be further transformed.

Since the labor process is the center of this metabolism, its historically varying forms must be explained by a “materialist” theory in Marx's sense. The key to such explanation lies in an account of the division of labor and its epochal changes in the course of human history. In The German Ideology, Marx refers to five epochs in the division of labor: those of tribal society, ancient slave society, feudal society, capitalist society, and the communist society that will supplant capitalism (Marx, Engels 1970, 37). The division of labor in ancient slave society, feudalism, and capitalism involves the division between classes, in other words, between those who own and control the means of production, and those who must work for them. Class divisions are relationships of exploitation based on the extraction and appropriation of an economic surplus from the labor of the direct producers. In addition to the division of labor involved in the class structure, however, there is also a distribution of productive tasks among different segments of the working population, a distribution required for the reproduction of society through the satisfaction of a multiplicity of needs. Such a differential distribution of productive tasks exists in each of the five social forms, with the exception of the most advanced stage of communist society. There, according to Marx, the productive forces will be so highly developed that people will be able to cultivate multiple activities just as they please, without having to limit themselves to a single specialized function (Marx, Engels 1970, 53).

One central aspect of the division of labor accounts for the illusion that ideologies exist independently of the metabolism between humanity and nature, and the related thesis, shared by Hegel and the Young Hegelians, that ideas drive the historical process. Once mental and manual labor become separated from one another, it becomes possible to believe that consciousness is “something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real” (Marx, Engels 1970, 51-52). Without the division between mental and manual labor that emerges in the real, material process of history, Hegel’s Absolute Idea would have been inconceivable, and so would its successors: the ego, species being, self-consciousness, and so on of the Young Hegelians.

In somewhat tentative and sketchy terms, Marx attempts to account for the specific transitions from each epoch in the division of labor to its successor. He will return to this task again and again over the subsequent course of his life. But just as importantly he articulates a general theory of transition:

These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity,

later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals – a form which in its turn

15

becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another (Marx and Engels 1970, 87). It is easy to miss the centrality of this thesis to Marx’s materialist theory of history

since it does not receive special emphasis in The German Ideology. It would take fourteen years for the thesis to be given the emphasis it deserves in the Preface to A

Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy. At that point, the earlier phrase, “forms of intercourse,” becomes the more precise idea of “relations of production.” It is worth quoting this formulation at length:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite

relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure (Marx 1970, 20-21). An ocean of ink has been devoted to the problems raised by the architectural

metaphor of superstructure and foundation, most of it concerned to avoid the implication that the “economic structure of society” unilaterally determines the “forms of social consciousness” (ideologies). Engels was the first to tackle this problem in his letter of 1890 to Joseph Bloch. In the letter, he emphasizes that the economic structure determines the course of history, and so the nature of "real life," though only "in the last instance" (in

letzter Instanz),6 and that the legal, political, and ideological elements of the superstructure also exert a determining influence, though not the decisive one. He even goes so far as to say that ideologies may determine the form taken by historical struggles (for example, the religious form taken by class struggles in Reformation Germany), though, by implication, their content is determined by the economic structure, the material foundation of society (Marx and Engels 1978a, 760-761).

For now, we will leave this problem aside. The important point to note at this stage in the discussion is that the passage quoted above from the Preface is merely a more precise and succinct statement of the position Marx had already arrived at in the German

Ideology that “forms of social consciousness” have no independent efficacy in history, but rather derive whatever efficacy they possess from the dynamic interaction of the relations of production and the forces of production that correspond to them. To quote again from the Preface:

16

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production (Marx 1970, 21). The assertion that people become conscious of material conflicts and fight them out

in ideological forms introduces a theme into Marx’s treatment that is also present in The German Ideology, but that we have yet to consider; the ruling ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the

class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it (Marx, Engels 1970, 64). This passage is a key to understanding Marx’s theory of ideology, but a great deal of

what is largely an outline needs to be filled in. What exactly are the “means of mental production?” These must certainly include human brains, just as the means of material production include human muscles, but brains do not produce ideologies apart from definite sets of social relationships, and these in turn require definite forms of economic organization. The production and distribution of ideas are economic processes similar to the production and distribution of material goods. The labor involved must be trained to perform a determinate range of tasks. Those who work principally with their brains must be relieved of the necessity to engage in material production through a salary, sinecure, or some other claim on social revenue. They must be provided with the tools necessary for accomplishing their work in the form of books, lecture halls, pens, paper, printing presses, archives, and so on. Their ideas must be distributed by means of transportation, including international transport in a global market. They must have available to them channels of communication sanctioned by the ruling class, including schools, universities, court houses, legislatures, theaters, and, more recently, such channels of mass communication as radio programs, television shows, the internet, etc. In short, the production of ideas is not an ideal affair, but a very material one; it requires a material infrastructure if it is to exist and be sustained. Raymond Williams made this point in his theory of “cultural materialism,” and so have a number of other Marxists involved in intellectual and ideological work (Williams 1982).

The class that owns the means of production, and that, under normal circumstances, controls the state, is also the class that owns and controls the material infrastructure that enables ideas to be produced and disseminated. In times of crisis, when the relations of

17

production and the forces of production come into overt conflict, a subordinate class, or alliance of subordinate classes, may be able to marshal the resources and will necessary to build an alternative ideological infrastructure. For example, toward the end of the medieval period, although the bourgeoisie was still a subordinate class, it was able to create newspapers as organs of its own ideology. In order to engage in ideological struggles, subordinate classes need a material infrastructure able to support the production and communication of ideas, though their more narrowly economic struggles alone can sometimes have disorienting effects on the dominant ideology, and in this sense find a presence in the ideological apparatus of the class that rules.

Even when generated by a revolutionary class, ideologies do not articulate truths without distortion. Though Marx does not say this explicitly, it is the clear implication of his treatment of ideology in both The German Ideology and the Preface. As long as the division between mental and manual labor continues to exist within revolutionary organizations (and how could it not, since revolutionary newspapers, for example, need typesetters as well as journalists?), as well as within society as a whole, the illusion that ideas have an autonomous efficacy persists. Only a fully developed communist society abolishes ideologies along with the division of labor that makes them inescapable. Until then, revolutionaries may become aware of ideological distortion, and do their best to minimize and struggle against it, but they can no more dispel the illusions of ideology than a camera obsura can stop inverting the images of objects:

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a

camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process (Marx, Engels 1970, 47).

The concept of inversion (Umdrehung) and the photographic metaphor connected

with it have a very specific reference in the context of Marx’s critique of Hegelian idealism, beginning in 1843 with his Contributions to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of

Right. There Marx tells us that Hegelian idealism makes the Idea the demiurge of history, and that it interprets the really existing realms of law and the state as mere externalizations, or objectified expressions, of the Idea. This is an inversion of the true relationship, since legal and political ideas (which Hegel regards as phases in the self-development of the Absolute Idea) are actually the expressions in thought of real legal and political systems. At least this is the use Marx makes of the concept of inversion in the Contributions. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, inversion pertains to the relationship between the worker and the products of labor which, in capitalist society, come to dominate their maker. In The German Ideology, Marx once again applies the concept of inversion to the realm of ideas, but this time with respect to the material foundation of human life in the relations and forces of production (he now interprets the spheres of law and the state as elements of what he will later call the “superstructure”). Ideological inversion, then, is the illusion that ideas are the active forces that determine the material conditions of human life, while in fact the material conditions are the real active forces, and ideas their second-level expressions.

If inversion is the original sin of all ideologies, then the naturalization of social relationships is the secondary sin of dominant ideologies. The Grundrisse and Capital,

18

volume 1 most explicitly treat the naturalization of social relationships in bourgeois ideologies, though the concept is implicit as early as The German Ideology:

The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant

material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. ...For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law" (Marx, Engels 1970, 64-65). The ruling class has an advantage over subordinate classes, not only in that it

possesses and controls the means of mental production, but also in that it need only express the dominant material relations – which are, in fact, the conditions of its dominance – in ideal form. But the adjective "ideal" takes on an added connotation in this context; the ancient, Platonic connotation of eternity.

The first paragraph of the Grundrisse builds on this insight. It makes the point that the individual is the product of a historical development that abolishes the ties that attached human beings to tribes, villages, guilds, and other forms of collectivity, making them essentially communal beings (Marx 1973, 83). The individual fully emerges only when market relations replace traditional social bonds. In the political treatises of Rousseau, the story of Robinson Crusoe by Defoe, and the political economy of Smith and Ricardo, this outcome of the historical process is converted into its presupposition. For these thinkers, individuals have always existed as natural entities, though it is bourgeois society that first affirms that fact by fully embracing market relations and the associated legal form of the contract. Though Marx does not use the word “ideology” in the Grundrisse, it is clear that he regards Rousseau’s political treatises, Defoe’s novel and those it inspired, and the political economy of Smith and Ricardo as forms of ideology, and specifically as forms of the ideology of the rising and eventually dominant bourgeois class. What makes them ideological is precisely the fact that they naturalize a product of history, and in so doing, eternalize it. If individuals have always existed, then the market through which they necessarily interact must also be an eternal, natural form. But this withdraws the market from the reach of social critique and practical transformation, since there is, after all, no point in attempting to reject what cannot be rejected, what is always with us as part of our “nature.”

In Capital, volume 1, Marx is more detailed in his treatment of the mechanism of ideological naturalization. There he describes market relations as apparently a “veritable Eden of the innate rights of man” (Marx 1992, 280). No one forces anyone to enter into relations of market exchange, and, once entered, the market treats all participants equally. Equal exchange of value is its dominant principle, even when those meeting in the market are capitalist and worker. But this ideology of market freedom and equality – which does in fact correspond to what Marx calls the “phenomenal form" of capitalism, in other words, the surface level of appearances – obscures the real process going on beneath that level in the depths of production. The free exchange of labor for a wage is an exchange of equivalents that hides the extraction of surplus value from the worker. The wage

19

corresponds to the value of labor power, since it covers the cost of reproducing the worker’s ability to labor. The worker, however, produces more value in the course of a day than is accounted for by the wage, and that surplus value accrues to the capitalist in the form of profit. Exploitation is masked by the exchange of equivalents, and the contradictory character of the relationship between capitalist and worker is hidden by apparently natural interactions between free and equal individuals in the market.

The naturalization of historically contingent social relations is in the interest of the dominant class, which wishes to withdraw the conditions of its dominance from the possibility of historical transformation, though it does, of course, become operative in the minds of subordinate classes because of their disadvantaged position in the production of ideas. There is, however, a further characteristic of ideology in class-divided societies that is shared by both dominant and revolutionary classes. In both cases, it stems from the need to retain or win state power. Whether an old ruling class, or one that seeks to replace it, the class involved must portray its own interest as the universal interest of all members of society. This need strictly corresponds to the supposed universality of the state which, democratic or not, always presents itself as that part of society that protects the interests of all. Marx makes a distinction between all earlier ruling classes, whose interests are really particular though represented as universal, and the proletariat, whose interests are genuinely universal. As early as the Fall of 1843, Marx wrote an introduction to his Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in which he argues that the working class is not so much a class as “the dissolution of all classes,” a sphere of society “that can invoke no traditional title but only a human title” (Marx 1994, 38). It is the only revolutionary class that cannot rest content until it abolishes itself, along with all other classes. However this may be, the point remains that even the proletariat, insofar as it aspires to state power, must portray its interests as universal. It is simply that, according to Marx, in this case alone, the portrayal is an accurate one.

We can say the following by way of summary. For Marx ideologies are: 1) forms of social consciousness, or equivalently, systems of normative ideas

(political, legal, economic, religious, artistic, moral, philosophical, etc.) that 2) are determined by the material foundation of society (forces of production and

relations of production in dynamic interaction), but 3) claim an existence independent of that material foundation, as well as an

autonomous efficacy, because of the division between mental and manual labor, and 4) require for their existence means of mental production that are largely material in

character. These are characteristics of all forms of ideology, even those generated in tribal

societies, and in the early phase of communist society before the division between mental and physical labor has been overcome. But there are two characteristics that we need to add to specific subsets of ideologies.

5) Ideologies of the dominant class treat historically produced social relations as natural and therefore eternal, and

6) ideologies of the dominant class as well as revolutionary subordinate classes portray the interests of the class concerned as universal in character.

What does all of this have to do with cinema? Can we interpret films as forms of ideology?

Some films are clearly ideological. Many of Frank Capra’s movies fall into this

20

category, such as Why We Fight (nationalism), as well as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life (populism). So does D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (white racism), Henry Hathaway’s Lives of a Bengal Lancer (imperialism), and John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock (liberalism). These films, and thousands more like them, are tendentious in the sense that they are made to convey a specific ideology. The director or scriptwriter takes on the task of developing an ideological viewpoint, either explicitly or implicitly. In the first case, one or more characters, or even a narrative voiceover, as in some of Capra’s films, might articulate the viewpoint. In the second case, and more subtly, the viewpoint might be implied by the plot, development of characters, styles of acting, cinematic techniques, etc. that the director chooses to employ. In both cases the resulting ideological viewpoint is that of the film itself, rather than simply the position of one or more characters within the film. One does not have to be a Marxist to discern the ideological nature of such movies. On the level of theory, standard sociological and political concepts of ideology are at no disadvantage here.

A more daring thesis, and one that Marx’s own concept of ideology suggests, is that ideological films are not a genre or subset of films in general. Stated positively, the thesis is that all films are ideological (with the possible exception of abstract films, such as much of the work of Stan Brakhage).

Abstraction aside, movies articulate ideas with normative import. They effect the propensity of the film audience to adopt this or that evaluation, to act in the future in such and such a way, or to feel this or that emotion. In Marx’s phrase, they are forms of “social consciousness.” In this regard, it is important to remember that Marx does not limit ideologies to conceptual systems, such as legal theories or political doctrines. In a passage we have already quoted from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy, Marx refers to “legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms.” The idea that art can have an ideological form is what is relevant here. We will discuss the theme of cinema as art in a moment. For now it is enough to say that the fact that cinema operates with images rather than concepts (although it can do that as well) does not disqualify it from the status of ideology, since art is not disqualified on the basis of its imagistic character. The point would hold even if cinema turns out not to be an art form.

Tracing the ways in which films are expressions of the conflict between forces and relations of production, as well as the class struggles that conflict unleashes, is an arduous task, fraught with dangers of dogmatic oversimplification. The need to exercise caution in pursuing this theme does not, however, mean that the main thesis of the materialist theory of history is inapplicable to cinema. It seems obvious that films draw their material, both narrative and cinematographic, from social reality, and that this is the case even for fantasy, science fiction, romance, and comedy. Clearly a film need not be tendentious in order to have social content. Think of the multiple ways in which the romantic comedies of the 1940s were affected by the Second World War, which itself can only be understood in the context of the Great Depression, the most momentous conflict between the forces and relations of production that global capitalism has yet experienced. Think of the way the conditions of women in the U.S. were changing as they were massively recruited to the workforce as a consequence of the war, and how the resulting tensions between men and women were translated by directors and scriptwriters into the language

21

of comedy. Other forms of comedy are equally unintelligible apart from the thesis that film is shaped by the material basis of society. Chaplin's early films play out in the aftermath of the inter-imperialist conflict of the First World War, and his later films against the background of the Great Depression and Second World War. Similarly, contemporary American film comedy has registered the effects of the financial collapse of 2007, and its sequel in the Great Recession. In science fiction, the battle between the republican rebels and the Empire in Star Wars derives from the renewed cold war of the Reagan years. Conversely, Avatar is an expression of the liberal critique of megacorporations, and their impact on the environment and indigenous populations. Global warming, and, more obviously, rain forest destruction – each a material process if ever there was one – are in the background of this film.

These very brief comments are not meant to substitute for genuine analysis, but merely to make plausible the thesis that film is conditioned by conflicts between the forces and relations of production, often by way of the historical and political events that are their primary expression. However, Engels' caveat bears keeping in mind. To say that the conflict between the forces and relations of production "determines" or "conditions" (Marx uses both words) the content and perhaps also the form of film is not to say that films are nothing but expressions of the material foundation of society. It is not even to deny that films may have some influence on the material foundation, which was a hope of Dziga Vertov, for example, in One Sixth of the World. Vertov’s movie attempts to heighten the revolutionary fervor, and hence the productivity, of Soviet labor by raising an awareness in workers of the expansive social character of their work and work responsibilities, in the process of exploring the far-flung interactions between people, and between people and nature, involved in producing a single fur coat, and selling it abroad to raise money for the development of Soviet industry. Determination in Marx's sense does not imply the kind of rigorous determinism involved where the initial conditions of an artificially isolated experimental system determine its future states, and so enable us to predict these states when we apply the appropriate physical laws. Certainly a form of causality is involved in Marxist determination, but a complex causality of interacting foundational and superstructural factors, in which the foundation is determinate, but only "in the last instance," in the sense that it constrains the possible outcomes of such interactions without forcing a decision between them. So for example, Dziga Vertov's film may or may not have been successful in increasing labor productivity, but it would have been impossible for it, or any other film, to jump over the phase of industrial development necessary for a fully developed communism. The materiality of human needs that would have to be satisfied to allow transition to a classless society would not have permitted it.

Most films efface their conditioning by material factors by creating imaginary and apparently nonmaterial worlds. The experience of going to a movie theater, sitting with an anonymous audience, having the theater lights dim, and the screen become illuminated with images is discontinuous with real life. There is a sense of disappointment when a film we like comes to an end and we must leave the theater, just as we feel disappointed when we awaken from a pleasant dream into our everyday existence. If most narrative films did not allow us to suspend our immersion in material reality for an hour and a half or so, then it would be impossible to explain their enormous popularity when economic times are bad. Consider the massive number of unemployed workers during the Great

22

Depression who were able regularly to scrape together the five or ten cent price of admission to the movies. As Adorno and others have pointed out, one of the principal functions of the movies in bourgeois society is to create an illusory realm of escape where people can find substitute satisfactions that compensate for everyday stress, exhaustion, boredom, and powerlessness.

But a kind of idealization is involved in all film, and not just those that dominate the movie theaters. Since the filmmaker must choose the footage that he or she wants the audience to see, all films idealize to one extent or another. That is to say, they transform reality into an ideal version of itself by emphasizing just a few of its elements, or, as in montage, by taking reality apart and putting it back together in a different way. Even movies that reflect about the process of cinematic idealization in this sense – such as most of Godard's films, or Woody Allen's Star Dust Memories – do so in ideal form. A critically self-reflective cinema is not one that denies this obvious fact, but rather one that calls attention to the final impossibility of the task of revealing the real world that film sets for itself, and in this way paradoxically accomplishes that task by making us aware of the real distance between film and reality.

There is no better example of the dependency of ideology on the material means of mental production than cinema. We do not need to repeat our earlier discussion of the film industry, but merely to note that, without its complex technical and economic processes, there would be no films at all.

The expense involved in marshaling the means of cinematic production as well as the conformism of mainstream film criticism in venues owned by major media corporations insures that most movies will espouse the ideology of the dominant class. As Marx says, the ideology of the dominant class is the dominant ideology. There is, of course, a difference between the conservatism of The Green Berets, and the liberalism of Coming

Home, for example. But this difference merely reflects a split within the dominant class in American society, in the 1960s and 1970s, between those who wanted to fight the Vietnam War to its genocidal end, and those who wanted to put an end to the domestic turmoil and loss of international support caused by the war. Both films, moreover, speak in the name of universal interests, interests of humanity as a whole. The Green Berets depicts the Vietnam War as a defense of freedom against totalitarian aggression. Coming

Home develops its antiwar position through a focus on the human tragedy of war. In both cases, the interest of the dominant class, as interpreted by one of its political factions, is effaced in its particularity. The result is the annihilation of history, its conversion into a timeless morality play.

A basic task of the ideological analysis of films is to demonstrate the ways in which the historically contingent structures of capitalist society are made to appear as natural and eternal properties of human life. A full discussion of this topic will have to wait until later chapters. But the comments above on the Green Berets and Coming Home point toward one such demonstration. A centrist position that wanted to mediate between hawks and doves in the name of national unity might bring out what is common to both films by focusing on the inescapable moral dilemmas of war. When is a war just, and when is it unjust? When does the human and political cost of fighting a war exceed the initial justification for engaging in war? Does the destructiveness of war mean that we ought to renounce all wars, or merely some wars, and, if the latter, which ones? The problem with these questions is not only that they presume a neutral, disinterested

23

assessment of war that has never existed and never will exist. It is also that they make the Vietnam War into an undifferentiated instance of the genus war, while seeking to understand hawks and doves as eternal parties to an interminable dispute. The same questions could be raised about any war at all. But the Vietnam War cannot be understood in its historical particularity by proceeding in this fashion. That war occurred in a very specific context (the wave of decolonization struggles that followed World War II), and with an explicit political motive on the side of the United States government (to stop the advance of communism in Asia, and thereby preserve its global hegemony). The economic motive of keeping, not so much Vietnam as the "Third World" as a whole, open to the investment of U.S. corporations, of course, also played an important part. In short, what the Green Berets and Coming Home both miss is the phenomenon of U.S. imperialism, which is not an expression of the unchanging dilemmas of war, but rather a historically contingent expression of a specific stage in the development of global capitalism, with its assertion of dominance by the U.S. state in the period following the Second World War.

If what we have said is correct, then the conclusion follows that all films are forms of ideology, and that most films are forms of the ideology of the dominant class. Marx’s concept of ideology points the way to a method of analyzing film that has practical as well as theoretical significance. A critical analysis of the dominant ideology can help loosen its hold on the minds of those who are not members of the dominant class (in the Marxist tradition, the working class and its potential allies), and so weaken the consensus the dominant class can normally expect from a population accustomed to acquiescing in its rule. At least that is the hope of an approach to understanding film inspired by Marx’s theory of ideology.

Cinema as Art

There is no developed theory of art in Marx's work. His major concerns lay elsewhere, in economics, politics, history, and, in a very unorthodox sense, philosophy. But there is a disadvantage in thinking of Marx in terms of traditional disciplinary categories. At its core, Marxism is a theory of social formations and the historical forces that bring them into existence, maintain them for a while, and then, after periods of crisis, transform them into their successor formations. A theory with such an expansive sweep must make a place for art as well as economics and politics, a fact Marx recognized in his assertion that, as an expression of the superstructure, art falls within the explanatory domain of a materialist theory of history. The subsequent history of Marxism as both theory and practice attests to the significance of art, even though Marx never treated the topic systematically.

While there is no developed theory of art in Marx's writings, there are, nevertheless, brilliant flashes of insight that help contribute to such a theory. An example is a famous passage from his unpublished draft Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy, where Marx reflects on the continuing appeal of Greek art (Marx 1973, 110-111). In opposition to the neoclassicism that seems to have attracted him in his youth, the passage rejects the possibility of any meaningful revival of Greek art in the current period. Marx tells us that, in an age that is beginning to harness the power of

24

chemistry and electricity on the basis of natural science, there is no place for the mythological beings, Vulcan and Zeus. And yet classical Greek statues exhibit a balanced and harmonious beauty of bodily form in their depictions of goddesses and gods that continues to enchant us. For Marx, this continued appeal raises a problem for the materialist theory of history. If Greek art is so radically incompatible with the forces and relations of production of capitalist industry, then why do we remain enthralled? The answer Marx gives goes beyond what the Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, will later call "non-contemporaneity," namely the claim that some works of culture have on the future, and the converse persistence of that claim made by works that are now past. Marx is concerned to explain why this non-contemporaneity should be possible at all. His answer is that it stems from the evident lack of coincidence between superstructure and foundation. Marx makes an Hegelian move by turning his problem into his solution, and in the process underscores the fact that materialist determination is not rigorously deterministic. There can be slack, delay, lack of conformity between foundation and superstructure that accounts for the continuing appeal of the art works of the past, and that is merely an expression of the complexities of all real historical determination. Through the Greeks, we (Europeans) relive our historical childhood, Marx says, and find it to have been a normal and happy one. The ancient Greek naïveté about the forces of nature is no impediment to our enjoyment of Greek art; it is, rather, its precondition, just as we may enjoy, in our adulthood, playing a game with a three-year-old child. And yet, Marx's comments do not imply any rejection of the schema of foundation and superstructure, with its assertion of the causal primacy of the former over the latter. The foundation remains determinate “in the last instance," as Engels said, and it is precisely this ultimate foundational determination that forecloses the possibility of a meaningful revival of Greek classicism in the age of industrial capitalism.

A materialist approach to cinema as art would take a direction opposite from the one Marx pursues in his reflections on Greek art. In the case of film, there is no question of a temporal disparity between foundation and superstructure. The emergence of cinema becomes possible only with a fundamental change in the technological and human forces of production. In this case, there is a direct correspondence between foundation and superstructure. The sober, scientific harnessing of chemistry and electricity that replaces Vulcan and Zeus makes cinema possible, and the summoning into existence by capital of an urban industrial population makes cinema, or some equivalent form of mass entertainment, necessary. With the arrival of cinema, determination of an element of the superstructure by the material foundation approaches deterministic rigor, even if it never quite arrives there.

The fact that cinema is a kind of mass entertainment is undeniable; whether it is a form of art was a subject of dispute in its early years. The reason lies in the way in which cinema established a break with earlier art. In the Renaissance, painters and sculptors had already made a successful claim to the status of poets, scholars, and their ilk, who were elevated above craft labor organized by the guilds by the fact that they worked with their minds and not their hands. In a grouping based on the classical theme of the seven muses, the arts at that time included poetry, history, music, dance, comedy, tragedy, and astronomy (Williams 1985, 41). In order to be admitted to their ranks, painters and sculptors had to demonstrate that they did not belong in the craft guilds because their work dealt in visual form with the same material that the Renaissance humanists sought

25

to master in the media of language, mathematics, music, and dance. Before his conversion to a fundamentalist version of Catholicism, Botticelli, for example, painted the Greek myths that the humanist scholars wrote about. The success of the bid by visual artists for elevated status was sealed with the emergence of an elite patronage system devoted to funding individual artists instead of placing orders with the guilds. Artists were freed from the restrictions of the guilds regarding apprenticeships, remuneration, and so forth, as the patronage of the upper classes raised their work to the level of that of their humanist brothers. Still, in spite of their successful migration from the manual to the mental side of the social division of labor, nothing could hide the fact that painters and sculptors continued to work with their hands. What was initially a liability became, over the course of the following four or five centuries, a necessary condition of visual art. Visual art came to be identified with the creation of images through the working of paint or stone by hand, though a hand as sensitively cultivated as the versifying mind of the poet, or the scholar’s grasp of the history and literature of Greece and Rome.

When photography arrived in the early nineteenth century, it caused an identity crisis in the visual arts. The reason, of course, is that the camera produces an image that rivals or exceeds the standard of realistic depiction that most people had come to expect from painting. There is no mystery about why this is the case. The camera obscura was an invention of the Renaissance that was originally an aid to painters for depicting space in perspectival recession, the central technical advance of Renaissance painting. The photographic image already existed in the sixteenth century, but it was ephemeral. All that photography required that the Renaissance was unable to provide was a means of preserving the image, and this had to wait until the chemical advances of nineteenth century industry. But once these advances were made, the conventions of perspectival realism effectively transmigrated from painting into the mechanism of the camera. It was henceforth possible to produce technically impeccable “realistic” images without the application of the cultivated, expressive hand.

The dispute that ensued over whether photography is art proceeded with the Aristotelian assumption that art has an essence that can be expressed in a definition, and that the problem is to determine whether photography shares that essence. However, what the parties to the dispute failed to grasp is that the category of art is not an Aristotelian essence at all, but a historically shifting configuration of practices. As we have seen, as late as the fifteenth century, painting and sculpture were excluded from art. The real problem that photography presented to the established visual arts was not that of deciding whether or not it belonged among them; it was that photography forced painting (and, by association, sculpture) to undergo a radical transformation, an expansion beyond their dependence on the human hand. If the main aesthetic achievement of Renaissance painting could be embodied in a machine, then art would have to set off along a path that had never before been blazed. It would have to reinvent itself in an era in which it could no longer defend its claim to the status of art by virtue of manual practice, however cultivated or expressive. The result was the birth of modern art, which achieved full awareness of its liberation from the expressive hand first in Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” and later in action painting, minimalist painting and sculpture, pop art, conceptual art, and so on

This liberation was already in process when cinema made its first appearance in the last five years of the nineteenth century. As a result, the “art world” was quicker to accept

26

the early directors as artists than was the case regarding the first photographers half a century earlier. After a period of uncertainty (an echo of the dispute over photography) that lasted no more than two and a half decades, there was little doubt in the minds of the cognoscenti that Griffith, Chaplin, and Eisenstein were artists of some sort. But what sort? What, exactly, were they doing, and how did it fit into the new configuration of practices that now constituted the visual arts? There is no easy answer to this question. It is the topic of thousands of books, critical articles, and academic research programs. But the question of the contribution Marx’s writings can make to an understanding of cinema as art is somewhat easier to answer.

Marx wrote The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in Paris under the philosophical influence of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity and Principles of the

Philosophy of the Future, the economic influence of Engels’ Condition of the Working

Class in England, and the political influence of the revolutionary communist movement that had originated at the end of the French Revolution under the leadership of Gracchus Babeuf, and whose successors were still active in Paris. Marx had recently lost his job as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper funded by liberal Rhineland industrialists, when the paper ran afoul of Prussian state censorship. He moved to Paris with his wife Jenny, where he participated in meetings of communist artisans, and for the first time began to identify with the communist movement. The Manuscripts were first published in the Soviet Union, and then only in fragmentary form, in 1927, and did not become widely available until after the Second World War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, they inspired a “humanist turn” in Marxism, which was famously attacked in 1964 by Louis Althusser in polemical writings published in his book, For Marx. Althusser claimed that the Manuscripts predated the “epistemological break” of the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology that established historical materialism as a “science” (Althusser 1970, 242-247). They are ideological writings rather than scientific ones in that they accept the bourgeois humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach. In essence, according to Althusser, Marx was trying to pour scientific communist wine into ideological bourgeois bottles. The reason behind this mistake was that Marx had not yet recognized the centrality of either the class struggle or the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, but developed instead an ideological critique of capitalism as an alienation of the human essence. But this approach is incompatible with the demands of science. According to Althusser, the epistemological break represented by the Theses on

Feuerbach and The German Ideology initiated the creation of a new science of history that rejected Feuerbachian humanism, but that would not receive a fully mature formulation until the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867.

While this is not the place to consider the controversy over Marx’s early humanism and the nature of Marxist science inspired by Althusser’s intervention, it is nevertheless important to note that Marx never abandoned his critique of alienation under capitalism, although the critique appears in different forms in the Manuscripts, the German Ideology, the Grundrisse, and the first volume of Capital. Marx clearly thought it was compatible with the science of history that he also hoped to found, and with the part of it he developed most fully in his own work – the critical theory of the capitalist mode of production elaborated in the three volumes of Capital, the Grundrisse, Introduction to the

Critique of Political Economy, and Theories of Surplus Value. Marx’s discussion of the historical formation of the senses in the Manuscripts of

27

1844 was influenced by Feuerbach’s insistence, in Principles of the Philosophy of the

Future, that human sensuousness must be placed at the center of any meaningful reflection on subjectivity, and that speculative philosophy, especially in its Hegelian form, had failed to give an adequate account of sensuousness (Feuerbach 1966, 64-65). For Hegel, as for most philosophers, the subject is primarily a thinker, and the world, the object of thought. But, according to Feuerbach, Hegel’s intellectualism misses not only the fact that our sole conduit to knowledge of the world is sensation. It also fails to understand the dual character of sensuousness as an epistemological faculty and an expression of human need. Sensuousness is not only sensation in the narrow, empiricist meaning, but feeling, passion, and suffering. Only a being that needs objects outside itself (in the crude form of food, but also in the form of the other person) is an objectively real being. Only a being that needs independently existing objects is able to suffer and experience passion and the richness of feeling. In each of its sensuous relationships, the human being expresses its objective, material character, and, in cultivating the totality of such relationships, the content of human species-being (Gattungswesen) unfolds as something universal.

In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach analyzes religious alienation as a projection of the image of the human species outside of itself in the alienated form of the object of worship. That analysis precedes his emphasis on human sensuousness in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future by several years. In the Manuscripts, Marx connects these two Feuerbachian themes (Marx 1976, 106-119). For Marx, the most fundamental form of alienation is not religious, but rather the alienation of the worker from the object he makes in his work. In capitalist production, the object is owned by an alien being who grows richer and more powerful the more objects the worker produces. The sensuous object of labor is alienated from its creator in the legal sense that it becomes someone else’s property. In a capitalist society, that legally alienated property takes the specific form of capital. By coming into the possession of the capitalist, the object of labor can be sold at a profit, and the profit channeled into new investment. The product of labor as capital thus assumes a self-expanding form. As the mass of capital grows, so does the poverty, insecurity, and bondage of the worker. When invested in the form of machinery, for example, capital throws a segment of the workforce into the ranks of the unemployed, which intensifies competition for jobs and drives down wages. The alienated object in the form of capital turns back against its maker as a hostile, destructive force, like the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelly’s novel.

Marx’s development of a concept of alienation that applies to the work process in capitalism is more than an extension of a Feuerbachian motif. From the start, it radically alters Feuerbach's framework. Since the worker makes the sensuous object that becomes capital, sensuousness now appears primarily in the form of the human activity of labor and its product. This is already Marx’s approach one year before the supposed “epistemological break” of the Theses on Feuerbach. It is true that Marx is still under Feuerbach’s influence in the 1844 Manuscripts. But it is also true that Marx’s account of alienation transforms Feuerbach’s passive, contemplative materialism into something active. The first of the Theses on Feuerbach begins:

The main defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach

included – is that the object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the

28

form objectivity, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively (Marx 1994, 99). The active character of sensuousness is already part of Marx’s account of the

alienation of the object of ‘human sensuous activity, practice” in the Manuscripts in its analysis of the labor process. The only point the first thesis adds is that Feuerbach was guilty of overlooking this active, subjective side of materiality. But that is a reassessment of Feuerbach; it is hardly an “epistemological break” in Marx’s thinking.

In the Manuscripts, the idea of sensuous activity leads Marx to an unprecedented, though tantalizingly brief consideration of the history of the human senses. He states his thesis in a single sentence that has far-reaching implications for a materialist theory of art:

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present (Marx 1976, 141). Beginning with Kant, one of the great achievements of German Idealism was its

emphasis on the active role the senses play in shaping the content of sensation. Sensing is not simply the passive reception of a content that originates outside the mind, as a naïvely empiricist theory would have it. It is the imbuing of that content with form, including the most fundamental forms of space and time. Kant devoted his difficult theory of transcendental schematism, which he articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason, to the process through which the categories of the understanding (first and foremost, causality) shape sensory content in advance of all experience, thereby making experience and its comprehension by science possible (Kant 1933, 180-187). This preformation of sensory content is “transcendental” in the sense that it is not something experienced, but rather a condition of the possibility of any experience at all. As such it occurs outside of history, since it is what makes the temporal progression and causal connections of history possible, just as it does those of physical reality.

Marx rejects this a priori purity of sensory shaping by making the formation of the senses the product of history. But he does not treat history as a transcendent force, a materialist version of divine providence, which would be merely a one-sidedly objective inversion of Kantian subjectivism. History is what Marx calls the “metabolism” of the human species and nature, their dialectically reciprocal relationship. He expresses this relationship in the Manuscripts, in terms influence by German romanticism, as the humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity (Marx 1976, 137). But for Marx, the locus of the humanization of nature and naturalization of humanity is the very prosaic and unromantic labor process.

According to the Manuscripts of 1844, history is primarily the history of “industry,” by which Marx means, not industrial production alone, but the general expenditure of human energy in transforming nature into a form capable of satisfying human needs. Every such act of transformation rebounds on the human beings who engage in it, changing and developing their subjective capacities, just as their capacities, when actualized, change the objective forms of the natural world. With respect to sensory experience, this means that the changing objects of sensation (the transformed material of nature) evoke and develop in the human being new sense capabilities, new ways of

29

seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting the world. To give an example that Marx does not, think of the way the palate of a wine connoisseur is shaped and refined by the range of wines he or she repeatedly savors, each the product of generations of agricultural labor mixed with the natural forces of rain, sunshine, wind, and soil. The number of discernible flavors expands with the connoisseur’s wine-tasting experience, as the results of the humanization of the grape fields through labor unlock new subjective capacities in the connoisseur’s tongue. Those flavors naturalize the human tongue in the sense that they shape its sensations by means of a wide and nuanced range of natural conditions, combinations, and possibilities.

We do not usually regard the tongue as an aesthetic organ, which is why the wine-tasting example is particularly instructive. “Aesthetics” comes from the Greek word, aisthesis, which means simply “sensation”. The fact that sight and hearing have been privileged in the arts over touch, taste, and smell is usually attributed to the greater clarity and objectifying character of the distance senses. This may be a mistake. The pleasures of the palate, and of tactile and olfactory sensation, have been cultivated by many enthusiasts – wine-tasters and gourmets, braille readers and libertines, perfumers and makers of incense – without being admitted into the arts, with the exception of a handful of contemporary artists who experiment with these sense modalities. However this may be, Marx’s account of the history of the senses is not limited by the traditional preference for sight and hearing, extending instead to the full range of human senses.

There is, however, one passage in which Marx focuses for a brief moment on hearing and vision in relation to music and the visual arts:

Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most

beautiful music has no sense for the nonmusical ear … for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the nonsocial man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form…) either cultivated or brought into being (Marx 1976, 140-141). If “human industry,” i.e. the labor process, is the metabolic interaction between

human beings and nature (as Marx will say in Capital), and if one aspect of this interaction is the formation of the human senses over the course of history, then aesthetics and historical materialism are, or at least ought to be, deeply connected.

The theme of the historical formation of the senses lay on fallow ground until Walter Benjamin took it up in the early 1940s. Remarkably, however, Benjamin had no access to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which had been published in the Soviet Union in 1927, but in a very limited edition. The context of his rediscovery is his now celebrated work on Baudelaire and the Paris of the nineteenth century, including the massive, and never completed, Arcades Project, the “Short History of Photography,” and the enormously influential “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Benjamin’s efforts at this time focused on developing a historical materialist theory of culture in the period of early modernism, roughly, the second half of the nineteenth century. “The Work of Art” essay, however, also extends to Benjamin’s own period, and this allows him to develop his ideas regarding cinema.

In “The Work of Art” essay, Benjamin writes:

30

Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long

historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history (Benjamin 2008, 23). This was, of course, Marx’s insight in the 1844 Manuscripts, but Benjamin had no

way of knowing that. He refers instead to the work of the Viennese art historians, Riegl and Wickhoff, on the late Roman art industry. But, while these scholars achieved important insights into the organization of perception in the late Roman period through a formal analysis of its artworks:

They did not attempt to show the social upheavals manifested in these

changes in perception – and perhaps could not have hoped to do so at that time (Benjamin 2008, 23). It is not enough for a materialist theory to demonstrate that the senses vary in

different societies and periods. It must also show the causal connections between these variations and the changes that occur in the material foundation of society. In the theory that Marx began to articulate one year after writing the Manuscripts, changes in the material basis are structured by a dynamic interaction between the developing forces of production and the relations of production that at first facilitate, and then constrain, those forces. While new relations of production (forms of property, class relations, the technical and social division of labor) make development of the forces of production (technology, knowledge and skills, modes of social cooperation, human labor power) possible, at a later stage, they thwart further advance. Since, in Marx’s view humankind never willingly abandons an advance in mastery of the conditions of its life, in a clash between the forces and relations of production, the latter must give way. The transition from one form of productive relations to another occurs in periods of social revolution. It is around these very periods that we ought to expect significant changes in human sensory organization to congeal.

“The Work of Art” essay contributes to the development of a materialist theory of the history of the senses by focusing on the impact the rise of industrial capitalism, and the related phenomenon of urbanization, had on the human sensory apparatus. It straddles two epochs of social revolution: the bourgeois revolution that freed the forces of production from the fetters of feudal social relations, and the proletarian revolution that would, hopefully, free the even more highly developed forces of industrial production from the fetters of capitalist social relations, fetters that had become evident in the Great Depression that gripped the world when Benjamin wrote his essay. It is in this context that Benjamin turns an idea from nineteenth-century occultism into a materialist concept.

In societies with dominant magical or religious practices, such as those of the ancient and medieval periods, artworks are created and displayed in ritual and cultic contexts. As a result, they possess an “aura." According to Benjamin, the aura is the mark of the artwork's authenticity and authority as an instrument of magical or religious practice. The peculiar thing about the aura of the artwork is that it exists independently of the conditions under which the work is viewed. For example, a statue of a saint may be

31

covered with a cloth for the entire year, except for a day when it is uncovered and paraded through the streets of the village. The statue retains its authenticity and authority even when it is veiled. When the statue is unveiled in the village streets, the villagers experience these properties in the form of the statue's aura, the sacred force field that surrounds it. The aura is the phenomenon of “an unbridgeable distance” between the villagers and the artwork.

In Benjamin’s account, the secular cult of beauty preserved the aura of the artwork in the early modern period (the Renaissance and its immediate aftermath), but the later development of capitalist industry divested the work of art of its aura. This happened with the emergence of technologies for the mass reproduction of images. Technologically reproducible images have no authenticity or authority, no location within tradition or cult. For example, there is no authentic or authoritative photographic print that could serve as a cult object. Every copy of a photograph is the precise and interchangeable equivalent of every other copy; none possesses a special status.7 As the aura of artworks disintegrates, they are freed for incorporation into other social practices. Benjamin focuses on those practices of the urban masses that attempt to master new conditions of perception.

The occurrence of shocks characterizes perceptual experience in city streets; a traffic accident, a criminal act, a building on fire, a chance encounter with a stranger. Unshaped by traditions or conventions, perceptual shocks present a threat to the coherence and intelligibility of experience. The response to the threat cannot lie in the revival of a tradition that has proven to be wholly inadequate for its mastery, but rather in the cultivation of a new perceptual orientation, which Benjamin calls, "reception in a state of distraction" (Benjamin 2008, 40).

The model of aesthetic reception for art prior to the technology of reproduction is the contemplative immersion of the spectator in the work of art. This model is tied to the classical bourgeois ideal of the cultivated individual. However, the aesthetic subject in the age of technological reproducibility is not an individual, but the urban masses. The attitude of this subject toward the artwork is the same as that in which it experiences the perceptual shocks of city life; an attitude, not of contemplation, but of reception in a state of distraction

The primary task faced by the human perceptual apparatus in the modern period is to master the shocks it receives in the distracted state of life in the city. Benjamin tells us that such mastery requires the development of habits that are more tactile than visual in character. To understand what he means by this, consider the example of a villager who moves to a city for the first time, and must learn how to cross streets busy with traffic. The villager cannot avoid being killed by the traffic by contemplating the vehicles bearing down on her. She must, instead, acquire a diffuse, almost somatic awareness of the traffic, without pausing for contemplative immersion, as well as the habit of crossing the street when vehicles are sufficiently distant, or the traffic signal has changed. Both the awareness of traffic and the habit of avoiding it occur in the state of distraction that is unavoidable in modern urban life.

For Benjamin, cinema is the privileged medium for mastering stimuli in a state of distraction, even though the acquisition of serviceable urban habits is not at issue here. The movie theater assembles the urban masses in the form of a collective aesthetic subject, just as the sporting arena brings them together as a collective spectator of sporting events. The film presents the masses with the opportunity to respond to a welter

32

of visual and auditory stimuli with the attitude of the expert. Expertise is to reception in a state of distraction what cultivation is to contemplative immersion. Just as every sports fan is an expert about the performance of his or her favorite team on the field, the filmgoer is an expert, sometimes about the performances of the actors and actresses in the film, more rarely about the techniques of directors, and often about the strengths and weaknesses of the film compared with other movies. Reception in a state of distraction brings to an end the cultivated and contemplative bourgeois audience, and brings into existence a mass audience possessing an expertise distributed across its members.

Benjamin also claims that the disintegration of the aura frees the reproductive arts (cinema first among them) for engagement in political practice. The connection between distracted expertise and politics is undoubtedly a legacy of Benjamin’s friendship with the Marxist poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht. In his theory of the Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect), Brecht had sought to replace the contemplative immersion of the audience in the spectacle of theater with an attitude of distanced reflectiveness toward the characters and events of a play. Only such an attitude is able to emancipate consciousness from the phenomenal forms of capitalist society, and this is a prerequisite for its revolutionary transformation. In the epoch of the domination of the bourgeoisie, classical theater becomes an instrument of class rule, and contemplative immersion the equivalent of a spell that must be broken by the revolutionary playwright. This was the purpose of Brecht’s use of such devices as placards with political slogans, the projection of images of demonstrations and police repression onto screens on stage, direct address of the audience by the actors, and the construction of gallows, boxing rings, and other scenes of violence or struggle apart from the diegetic space of the play. It was also the purpose of his musical collaborator, Kurt Weill’s mixture of the melody of popular jazz and cabaret music with more advanced musical forms, including dissonance, double tonic constructions, and nontonal sets. The combined purpose of play and musical score is to block the identification of the audience with the play’s characters, its enchantment by the play’s music, as well as other forms of absorption in the theatrical spectacle. Only in this way is it be possible for the theater to help emancipate the consciousness of the masses from bewitchment by the surface appearances of bourgeois society (Zabel 1992). A good part of Benjamin’s politics of cinema involves a transposition to the film medium of such theatrical Brechtian themes.

Benjamin sums up his revolutionary hopes for cinema in a single paragraph of “The “Work of Art:”

The technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the

masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film. The progressive attitude is characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure – pleasure in seeing and experiencing – with the attitude of expert appraisal. Such fusion is an important social index. As is clearly seen in the case of painting, the more reduced the social impact of an art form, the more widely criticism and enjoyment of it diverge in the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. Not so in the cinema (Benjamin 2008, 36).

33

This new mode of cinematic reception, this fusion of enjoyment and critique, has its counterpart in a new way of creating the artwork, a method of filmmaking that differs radically from the arts of traditional painting and theater. By means of montage (a word Benjamin does not use, though he describes the technique clearly enough), filmmakers are able to respond to the shocks of modern experience by probing and penetrating visual appearances, breaking them up and recombining them in new ways. In this fashion, they become masters of the fragmentary and discontinuous. The background to this insight is undoubtedly the year Benjamin spent in the Soviet Union in 1926-27, at a time when the Soviet film industry was in the bloom of its youth. Though it is surprising that he does not refer to Eisenstein in this context, since the Soviet director is the greatest theorist of montage, he does make a reference to Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin. The reference concerns Vertov’s use of ordinary Russian workers and peasants in place of professional actors, the counterpart on the side of filmmaking to the mass audience on the side of reception.

In spite of the sometimes suggestive and laconic character of Benjamin’s prose, as well as the semi-arcane character of the idea of the “aura,” The Work of Art in the Age of

Its Technological Reproducibility deserves the wide readership it has found, but for a reason of which most readers are unaware. The essay is the first contribution to a materialist theory of the history of the senses, and the role of art in that history, since the handful of pages Marx wrote in the Manuscripts of 1844. The fact that it regards cinema as an important stage in the history of the senses is an insight we will pursue in the second chapter of this book, when we discuss early Soviet film.

Benjamin submitted his essay for publication by the Zeitschrift für Socialforshung, the journal of the Institute for Social Research that had relocated from Frankfurt to New York City, and then to Los Angeles during the Hitler years. The most important figures in the Institute during this period of its existence were Max Horkheimer and Benjamin’s younger friend, Theodor Adorno. Adorno responded to Benjamin’s submission on behalf of the Zeitschrift’s editorial board. Though the Zeitschrift eventually accepted the essay for publication, albeit in a highly edited form intended to escape the eye of American anti-communist critics, Adorno expressed his theoretical objections to the piece in a letter to Benjamin. Trained as a composer of atonal “new music” under Schoenberg’s student, Alban Berg, Adorno was highly skeptical about the supposed virtues of photography and cinema. When he reviewed Benjamin’s manuscript in 1936, he was developing the concept of the “culture industry” that he was to introduce in the Dialectic of

Enlightenment, and that became a lynchpin of Adorno’s thinking until his death in 1968. But this concept, with its related theme of the psychological regression of the mass audience, runs directly against the grain of Benjamin’s essay. In his letter to Benjamin of 1936, Adorno states his objections to the idea that cinema offers the masses the opportunity to play a progressive aesthetic and political role:

The laughter of the audience at a cinema …is anything but good and

revolutionary; instead it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism. I very much doubt the expertise of the newspaper boy who discusses sports; and despite its shock-like seduction I do not find your theory of distraction convincing – if only for the simple reason that in a communist society work will be organized in such a way that people will no longer be so tired and so stultified that they need

34

distraction. …If anything does have an aural character, it is surely the film which possesses it to an extreme and highly suspect degree. To select only one more small item: the idea that a reactionary is turned into a member of the avant-garde by expert knowledge of Chaplin’s film’s strikes me as out-and-out romanticization. For I cannot count [Chaplin], even after Modern Times, as an avant-garde artist (the reason will be perfectly clear from my article on jazz) … One need only have heard the laugher of the audience at the film to know what is actually happening (Adorno 1980, 123-124). This is not the place to defend Chaplin against Adorno’s critique, but there is an

anecdote about Adorno and Chaplin worth relating.8 Adorno was living in Hollywood at the time, and had been invited to a party celebrating the release of The Best Years of Our

Lives, a film by William Whyler about the reentry into civilian life of three servicemen at the end of the Second World War. Two of the discharged soldiers’ roles were played by the actors, Frederick March and Dana Andrews, but the third role was played by the nonprofessional, Harold Russell, a real discharged soldier who had lost his arms in combat, and had been trained by the army to use two prosthetic hooks in their place. Whyler’s film was “progressive” in that it developed a critique of the U.S. class hierarchy by following the reversal in status between Frederick March, a sergeant in the army and bank vice-president in civilian life, and Dana Andrews, an air force pilot in the war and soda jerk in civilian life. At the Hollywood party, someone wanted to introduce Harold Russell to Adorno. When Adorno turned to shake Russell’s hand, he saw the prosthetic hook for the first time and recoiled. Chaplin, who was also a guest at the party, witnessed the event and mimed Adorno’s recoiling motion. Witnesses to the impromptu performance laughed of course, but the result was, not a discharge of “bourgeois sadism,” but rather a matter of diffusing an awkward social situation. The anecdote leads us to question how Adorno could be certain that the laughter of the audience at Modern Times was sadistic.

There are two additional objections that Adorno raises to Benjamin’s interpretation of cinema, each more theoretically substantive than the anti-Chaplin comments. The first is that motion pictures are highly “auratic,” a claim that does not make much sense until we consider Adorno’s later critique of the culture industry. What he was probably referring to is the cult of the Hollywood movie star, since the figure of the glamorous actor or actress embodies all the qualities of authenticity, authority, and a distance that cannot be bridged that are properties of the aura in Benjamin’s account. Even the word “glamour” had its original home in magical practices. Adorno’s general point may very well be true. But Benjamin had never given a positive evaluation of the movie star cult. On the contrary, he reserved his approbation for Dziga Vertov’s refusal to use professional actors, which was also, ironically, echoed in the incident with Harold Russell.

The second substantive theoretical objection is that there would be no need for perception in a state of distraction in a communist society, when the rational organization of the labor process would free workers from the boredom and exhaustion that require distraction as an antidote. But here we can see that Adorno failed to recognize the implications of Benjamin’s remarks about a history of the senses in his essay. Benjamin took up an authentically Marxian theme that had remained undeveloped since the 1844

35

Manuscripts, that of a materialist theory able to account for the historical transformation of the senses by reference to the conflict between forces and relations of production. But that means that Benjamin cannot be offering a theory of aesthetic reception in an advanced communist society, because no such society existed at the time he wrote his essay. The forces of production had nowhere been fully developed, and the relations of production had nowhere been fully transformed. No Marxist believed that the Soviet Union was a communist society, but only that it was, at most, a transitional stage on the path leading to communism. Perception in a state of distraction is a reconfiguration of the human sensory apparatus that pertains to the period of industrial capitalism, and the rise of the workers’ movement during that period. The political-aesthetic implications of this shift in human perception, which Benjamin drew from his reading of Marx and his conversations with Brecht, concern the social revolution needed to overthrow the existing capitalist order, and not the society that would, hopefully, be created after that overthrow. In addition, Adorno failed to recognize that Benjamin did not use the concept of distraction to mean diversion, which is the obvious sense implied by Adorno’s critique. The concept instead refers to the way in which sensations are received in the ordinary course of urban life, and the aesthetic response to the changed conditions of perception in the new medium of film. In short, Adorno’s critique misses both Benjamin’s main theoretical point, and the place of the concept of distraction in his account of the history of the senses in the epoch of industrial capitalism.

There is an important pendant to Adorno’s critique of Benjamin in an essay the former wrote in 1966, just two years before his death, titled “Transparencies on Film.” In the essay, Adorno continues to bemoan what he sees as the psychological regression of the film audience, and the film as a work that risks being conformist from the beginning by virtue of its production by the capitalist film industry. But unlike his 1936 letter, Adorno now sees the possibility of a cinema able to achieve the critical break with prevailing social conditions that he had previously reserved for the work of autonomous, avant-garde art, whose paradigm for him was Schoenberg and the other atonal composers. The autonomous work of art achieves that break in pursuit of the most advanced possibilities of artistic technique, by pushing the forces of aesthetic production to the point where they shatter the old relations of production as reflected in the work. That is the significance of Schoenberg’s music, which freed the dissonances of late Romanticism (Wagner, for example) from the apparently natural relations of the tonal scale. In his essay, Adorno now believes that something similar is possible for film, though cinema must proceed in a direction opposite that of the autonomous work of art. The reason is that pursuit of the most advanced technical means in cinema can lead only to the Hollywood studio film or its equivalent, in other words, to the total commodification of film. In order to keep faith with its own aesthetic possibilities, cinema must resist technical sophistication by allowing roughly formed, sometimes chance elements into its structure. Adorno writes approvingly of Antonioni’s film, La

Notte: Whatever is ‘uncinematic’ in this film gives it the power to express, as if with hollow eyes, the emptiness of time (Adorno 1991b, 180). Adorno now even has praise for Chaplin, who rejected technical sophistication, and

36

focused instead on perfecting the expressive and communicative qualities of performance in his films:

This in no way lowers Chaplin’s status and one can hardly doubt that he was “filmic.” Nowhere but on the screen could this enigmatic figure – reminiscent of old-fashioned photographs right from the start – have developed its concept (Adorno 1991b, 180). Adorno had the rare virtue of becoming less dogmatic with age. Toward the end of

his life, he wrote guardedly enthusiastic treatments of electronic music, expressing great respect for Stockhausen's work. Who knows? Had he lived longer, he might even have found good things to say about jazz.

Cinema as Commodity

It seems obvious now that, in 1936, Adorno was unable to understand the significance of Benjamin’s approach to aesthetics in the “The Work of Art” as a materialist history of the formation of the senses, and so was not able to grasp the politics of cinema it attempted to illuminate. This is because Adorno tried to understand Benjamin’s innovation within a context not appropriate to it, a framework he and Benjamin had developed jointly in earlier years. This was an easy mistake to make, because Benjamin framed his ideas about Baudelaire and the Paris arcades within this context at the same time he was writing “The Work of Art.” In addition, he sent the manuscript of the essay to Adorno along with a précis of his work on the Arcades Project, “Paris – Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Adorno could hardly be blamed for failing to see the very different problematic operating in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”

Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theoretical projects had developed in intimate connection with one another through a series of conversations between the friends that extended from their earliest acquaintance to Adorno’s emigration to the United States and Benjamin’s emigration to France in flight from fascism. What the two projects shared was a common approach to the significance of Marx’s theory of the commodity-form, not as a category of political economy, but as a key to unlocking the meaning of cultural works.

In this, they were following in the wake of Georg Lukács’ brilliantly unorthodox use of the theory in History and Class Consciousness, which he published in 1923. The central essay in that book, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” interprets proletarian emancipation as the fulfillment of classical German philosophy, and the working class as the identical “subject-object of history,” on analogy with Hegel’s conception of Absolute Spirit. The working class would achieve this identity by freeing itself and everyone else from what Lukács called the “reification” of society (Lukács 1971, 83-222). The idea of reification is the result of a fusion of Marx, Hegel, and Max Weber, the last of whom had been Lukács’ teacher. From Hegel, Lukács took the idea of the historical process as a return of the subject from its objectified forms of social existence to the recognition of its own presence and agency behind their thing-like crust.

37

From Weber, Lukács adopted the conception of modern society as an “iron cage” of market relations and bureaucratic norms, a cage in which the modern subject is trapped. Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities is the middle term through which Lukács links the ideas of Hegel and Weber, since the commodity-form is origin of the appearance of social relations as relations among things, and therefore the key to understanding objectification in its Hegelian and Weberian expressions. The German word usually translated as reification is Verdinglichung, which literally means “thingification,” an unfortunately ugly neologism in English, but one more descriptive of the phenomenon designated by the term for readers of English than the Latinate “reification.” In any event, in reification, the acts through which subjects create the social world are obscured and forgotten in the presence of a society that appears to be an autonomously existing thing. Moreover, in Lukács’ treatment, reification recoils on the subjects whose activity lies at the origin of the reified world. Because the human personality must be incorporated into reified social relations, it too takes on the appearance of a thing, or more precisely, a collection of thing-like properties that can be sold in the market as labor-power.

For Lukács, the commodity-form is the key, not only to reification, but also to world-historical emancipation. In order to bring about the communist revolution, the proletariat must achieve consciousness of its own character as a thing. It must come to understand the nature of the commodity, labor-power, in which its creative capacities are alienated, in the historical act through which it attempts to abolish the commodity-form. In the process of attaining true class consciousness, the object – labor as a commodity – becomes the active subject of history. The split between subject and object is overcome in the revolutionary practice of the proletariat, and its creation of a communist society.

After criticism from Soviet and Hungarian communists, Lukács rejected the position he had elaborated in History and Class Consciousness as an attempt to “out-Hegel Hegel” (Lukács 1971, xxiii). The grounds for criticism were confirmed in Lukács’ mind when he was finally able to read Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In that work, Marx made a careful distinction between the objectification of labor and its alienation. As a matter of species-necessity, work – the transformation of nature – produces an object independent of the producer. However, the object of work is alienated only under specific social conditions, in which it turns back against the worker as a hostile force. But this means that no revolution can dissolve objectifications back into the laboring subject, since objectification is an anthropological universal. The point of the communist revolution instead is to destroy the alienated character of the world workers produce under capitalist conditions. The idea of an identical subject-object of history belongs to Hegel, not Marx. Lukács came to see it as a consummate expression of idealism.

Neither Adorno nor Benjamin were under the spell of Lukács’ identical subject-object of history. Adorno in particular rejected the category of identity as the very core of reification when he developed his own “negative dialectic” (Adorno 1997). For him, identity is the logical form of the domination by the subject of what differs from it. In particular, the imposition of identity is the way in which human beings assert their domination of nature. Under capitalism, in particular, human technology reduces nature to an object of use without recognizing its autonomous being. Adorno's dialectic is negative because it insists on the irreducible being of the object, on its nonidentity with

38

the categories generated by the subject's thought and action. On Benjamin’s part, the early influence on his work of Jewish mysticism and messianism protected him from the lure of identity, since, even in the messianic days, the Absolute in Judaism remains something radically Other than the human subject. Nevertheless, in Lukács’ theoretical expansion of the commodity-form beyond political economy to society and culture as a whole, Adorno and Benjamin found the main thread of what the former calls their “general line.”

In his work on Baudelaire and the related Arcades Project, Benjamin did indeed pursue this general line, though not always in the way Adorno would have liked. His focus was on the expansion of the commodity-form in its industrial character in nineteenth-century Paris. The arcades were early versions of shopping malls, housed in passageways erected between existing buildings, and constructed from the industrial products, iron and glass. Benjamin suggests that they are counterparts of the catacombs beneath the Parisian streets, containing, not the bodies of the ancient dead, but their mirror reflection in the upper world as “commodities on display.”9 The secret compact with death is especially evident in the realm of fashion, where the commodity fetish fuses with its Freudian counterpart in an adoration, not of the living body, but of its inanimate appurtenances:

[Fashion] prostitutes the living body to the inorganic world. In relation to the living it represents the rights of the corpse. Fetishism, which succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic, is its vital nerve; and the cult of the commodity recruits this to its service (Benjamin 1983, 166).

In the Paris of the nineteenth century, commodity fetishism comes into its own as an aesthetic force, in the sense that it makes an appeal to perception. The phantasmagorical appearance of social relations as relations between things is now palpably present to the senses. In this context, Benjamin cites Balzac’s characterization of Paris as “the great poem of display.” According to the précis Benjamin sent to Adorno, “Paris – Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” commodities make their glittering appearance in the shops that line the interior of the arcades, and their fetishistic character shapes a host of related phenomena, from the drawings of Grandville, to the World Expositions, to the dioramas of Daguerre.

Adorno’s approach was different, more immanent than Benjamin’s, that is to say, more focused on the internal characteristics of artworks. It was also bifurcated in a way that Benjamin’s approach was not since Adorno applied it in two directions: first to the products of the culture industry, and second to the autonomous work of art. The critique of the culture industry as a form of commodity fetishism is rather straightforward. In fact, the culture industry is defined by its treatment of cultural products as mass-produced commodities, similar to those of any other capitalist industry. Standardization of the product model, market research, promotion through advertising, incidental variation to stimulate new consumer demand, public testimony, celebrity promotion, and so on, are in principle no different for a tube of toothpaste, a popular song, or a hit movie (Horkeimer and Adorno 1972, 120-167).

Application of the ideas of the commodity-form and fetishism to the autonomous work of art is more subtle and complicated. It is a major theme of Adorno’s magisterial

39

Aesthetic Theory, a work that, unfortunately, he left incomplete at his death. In the book, Adorno accepts the obvious fact that even autonomous artworks are commodities in a capitalist society, but he makes what a Marxist would ordinarily consider a vice into a virtue. The most important expression of the commodity-form in the autonomous work of art is a matter of aesthetic immanence; it is internal to the work. In particular, reification and the fetish character constitute the inner substance of the work, the medium through which it is able to articulate its truth. The truth of art is the truth of society. But society is present within the closed totality of the work, the work as a separate entity, the work as a "monad." Autonomous art cannot escape the fact that society is reified. It encounters the commodity fetish within its own substance.

As a product of what Adorno provocatively calls "Spirit" – which is, in his usage, merely another name for social labor in its universal dimension – , the autonomous artwork contains within itself the characteristics of production prevailing in its society and historical period. These include the forces of production in the form of the currently most advanced artistic techniques, and the problems of mastery of aesthetic material that these techniques must solve in order to advance the further development of art. Society is present within the artwork, not as an explicitly social content or theme, but precisely in the formal dimensions of the work. Adorno’s use of Leibniz’s word, “monad” in this context is felicitous in that the autonomous work of art (a Schoenberg string quartet, a novel by Kafka, a painting by Kandinsky) is “windowless,” as is the Leibnizian monad. It is something apart from the social whole that nevertheless mirrors society within itself (Adorno 1970, 268-270).

This is what makes the autonomous, avant-garde work of art a “fetish.” In withdrawing into itself, in sealing itself off from the outside world, the work becomes thing-like. However, for it, reification is not false consciousness, but the truth about a reified world. The only way the artwork can overcome the fetishism of commodities that dominates capitalist society is by becoming a fetish itself, by asserting its autonomous thinghood against the principle of exchange. As a form of truth, the work has no exchange-value, no market equivalent, in spite of whatever price the art-market brings.

Commodities are fetishes, according to Marx, because their interactions with one another in the market are the distorted expression of relations between people. Commodities are governed by the principle of exchange, of the equivalence of value for value, and the people whose relations with one another are mediated through commodities experience this equivalence as a mythic fate. Adorno and Benjamin agreed that the exchange of commodities is the social form of the eternal return of the same that is the essence of myth. As such, it abolishes history, along with the ability of people to master their fate. Consider, for example, the eternal return of clothing fashions, the incessant recycling of what once was new. Even when fashions innovate, the new fashion becomes old as soon as it enters the market, and so must be replaced with another new fashion, no different from it in that respect. In market exchange, we are always faced with the mythic return of the same. According to Adorno, the autonomous work of art can break the spell of exchange only by withdrawing into itself, by becoming even more reified than the commodity, even more fetishistic than the commodity fetish. This is the only way it can preserve the image of a world in which human beings are finally liberated from the principle of exchange (Adorno 1970, 334-348).

Can cinema perform this role? Can it reify itself to the point where it is able to

40

withdraw from a false society in order to preserve the image of a true one, even if only in the negative form of dissonance and suffering, even if only by preserving the promise of happiness by “tearing the mask from the countenance of false happiness” ( Adorno 1991a, 33)? At least until “Transparencies on Film,” Adorno did not think so. He rejected Benjamin’s Brechtian confidence in the collective proletarian subject, and the associated ideas of expertise and perception in a state of distraction. But, as we have seen, in his last years, Adorno considered a reprieve from his earlier judgment. By avoiding the technical perfection that is a demand of other autonomous art, and so by avoiding domination by the cinematic principle of marketability, he suggests that film might be able to incorporate something akin to the dissonance of atonal music. That is the significance of his appreciation of La Notte. Generalizing from his assessment of Antonioni's film, it seems that Adorno was finally willing to admit the existence of a cinematic avant-garde.

In his correspondence with Benjamin in 1936, there is a remarkable phrase by Adorno. The autonomous work of art and the technologically reproducible work, “are the torn halves of an integral freedom to which however they do not add up” (Adorno 1980, 123). The implication (unrecognized by Adorno at the time, it seems), is that avant-garde art and technologically reproducible art each have a role to play in keeping faith with the possibility of an emancipated society, even though the two conjoined are unable to bring into existence the integral whole of a world fit for human habitation. But that, after all, is the task of revolutionary praxis, which will bring us eventually to the makers of early Soviet film.

Cinema as Dialectic

Cinema is an art of motion. It distinguishes itself from still photography through the creation of an illusion of motion by means of the transition from one image to another. For a long time, film theorists thought the illusion was the result of the “persistence of vision,” and even now it is not uncommon to find this idea in introductory texts on film. According to the theory, each image projected on the movie screen is supposed to linger on the viewer’s retina long enough to overlap with the succeeding image, thereby creating a hybrid image that is the vehicle of the illusion of motion. As early as 1912, however, the founder of Gestalt psychology, Max Wertheimer, demonstrated the fallacy involved in this theory. The retina does not record images in a way analogous to photographic film. Instead, it transmits messages, by way of the optic nerve, to interior structures of the brain, where the messages are processed.10 There is no visual image at all until the processing takes place. Even now, the causes of the illusion of motion are not well understood, but that is a problem for neuroscience, not for Marxism. Whatever its causes, the illusion of motion is itself something real, and it is what distinguishes the art of cinema from the other plastic arts. It is also what makes Marx’s theory of dialectic relevant to film, since dialectic is first and foremost a theory of motion, transition, and other forms of change. Sergei Eisenstein was the first filmmaker to recognize this in his writings on dialectical montage. We are going to discuss those writings in relation to Eisenstein’s films in the second chapter of this book. But in order to understand dialectical montage, it is first necessary to understand dialectic.

Like most philosophical concepts in circulation in the West, dialectic originated in

41

ancient Greece. It first appeared in Socratic circles, where it referred to the practice of philosophical disputation. As such, dialectic involves two parties to a theoretical dispute. The first party states his position and develops an argument in its support, and the second party produces a critique of that argument, designed to show that it involves some hidden contradiction that refutes the original position. Two of the basic concepts involved in later versions of dialectic are present in this, its initial appearance – those of negation and contradiction. The second party to the dispute negates the position of his opponent by demonstrating the contradiction internal to it. It is apparent, then, that the Socratic version of dialectic lacks the aspect of positive development that would later become central to its Hegelian and Marxist versions. This is because Socrates was interested only in refutation. He had no affirmative doctrine to teach, but claimed only the superiority that came from recognition of his own ignorance. His dialectic is purely negative in that its purpose is to deflate the pretensions of those social authorities (generals, legal scholars, religious experts, Sophists, and so on) who claimed to have positive insight into the nature of the Good.

Ancient dialectic had a parallel development in the Eleatic school, most famously in Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. The founder of the school, Parmenides, had announced the radical thesis that the world is false as it appears to the senses because it involves the illusion of change. Since only being is and nonbeing cannot be, there is no vacant space into which anything could move, no distinction of parts – in which this part is not that one – that would allow them to be rearranged, and no possibility that anything could cease to exist. Change is impossible, since its idea involves the inadmissible presupposition that nonbeing actually exists. Zeno’s purpose in his paradoxes is to defend his master’s, Parmenides' thesis by demonstrating another contradiction involved in the assertion that motion is real. The contradiction consists in the fact that, for motion to be possible, it would be necessary to traverse an infinite series of spatial points in a finite time. The runner, Achilles, for example, must reach midpoint after midpoint in the journey toward his goal. However far he has traveled, there is always another midpoint to reach between his current location and his destination, and so it is impossible to reach the goal. Like the Socratic dialectic of argumentation, the Eleatic dialectic of motion ends in a negation without content. There is no positive result, but merely the refutation of an initial position, in this case, the position that motion is something real.

Plato was the first philosopher to give dialectic a productive and cumulative twist. In the Republic, he says that philosophical knowledge must reverse the procedure of mathematics, which begins by assuming the truth of some “hypothesis” (or, as we would now say, some postulate), and then proceeds to reach conclusions deductively. By contrast, the role of dialectic is to mount from hypothesis to superior hypothesis, from deductive postulate to the conditions of its truth, until the philosopher finally arrives at the form of the Good, which is the source of all Truth and Being (Plato 1991, Book VII 533c and d). But the conception of a positive dialectic in the Republic competes with the dialectical exercises in Plato’s later dialogue, the Parmenides. Placed by Plato into the mouth of Parmenides, these exercises have no positive result, but simply show the contradictory implications that follow from the proposition that “the One is,” as well as the proposition that “the One is not.” With the exception of a sequel in Neoplatonism based on the positive dialectic described in the Republic, this inconsistency is where ancient dialectic ends.

42

When Kant revived dialectic in the eighteenth century in his Critique of Pure

Reason, it was with the nugatory results of ancient dialectic in mind. The purpose of the book’s chapter on “Transcendental Dialectic” is to establish that the theses of metaphysics are incapable of demonstration. Kant shows that each of two contrary metaphysical theses – say that the world had a beginning in time, and that it had no beginning in time – can be validly proved. But since it is not possible for both to be true, this involves us in a contradiction. Kant’s approach here is similar to Plato’s in the Parmenides, though his purpose is the anti-Platonic one of demonstrating that metaphysical assertions cannot be forms of knowledge. No thesis about reality as it is in itself, apart from the conditions of possible experience, can survive the acid of dialectical dissolution.

Hegel was the first philosopher since Plato to claim a positive role for dialectic, and this claim was far more consistently and fully developed than that of Plato himself. First of all, Hegel rejected the idea that contradiction is a form of refutation. In his view, what Zeno actually demonstrated with his paradoxes of motion is not that motion is unreal because it is contradictory, but conversely, that contradiction is real in the form of motion (Hegel 1976, 440). In terms of the paradox of Achilles, for example, it is not the case that the runner fails to reach his destination because he keeps on reaching points midway between the destination and the place he is at. The simple fact is that Achilles does reach his destination. But this must mean that motion is Zeno’s contradiction as something objectively real, or, differently stated, that the contradiction is expressed in the motion through which Achilles finally reaches his goal. For Hegel, far from being empty, contradiction is “the root of all movement and vitality” (Hegel 1976, 439).

The step taken by Hegel is a momentous one because it seems to put him at odds with the most fundamental law of logic, that of non-contradiction. Logicians have demonstrated that, from the conjunction of two contradictory statements, the truth of every possible statement follows. Not just the discourse of the philosopher, but any discourse at all, becomes meaninglessly inconsistent once we admit contradiction. This would seem to put Hegel in a bind. Either he must give up the dialectical principle of real, existing contradiction, which lies at the center of his philosophy, or he must accept that the principle turns his philosophy into hopeless nonsense.

This point has been a topic of debate ever since Hegel’s dialectic first appeared publicly in mature form in his Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. One thing seems clear. Hegelian contradiction cannot be identical with logical contradiction as conceptualized in the traditional logic of statements. If it truly is “the root of all movement and vitality,” and not the annihilation of all meaningful discourse, then contradiction as Hegel thinks of it must have some other meaning. But what?

One way to approach this problem is to think of contradiction in relation to time. We might reason in the following way. If time were not real, then contradictory states would exist simultaneously, all of them concentrated into the punctual moment of an eternal Now. The oven would be hot and it would not be hot, it would be raining in southern California and it would not be raining in southern California, and so forth. In other words, the law of non-contradiction would be violated. But, since time is real, these contradictory states are assigned to different moments, different temporal “locations.” Traditional logicians would say that this need for differential assignment signifies that the law of non-contradiction holds. Hegel, on the other hand, would say that the existence of

43

change over the course of time means that contradiction is real; in other words, that it is in order to resolve the contradiction that the differential assignment of states occurs, and the process of change transpires.

Unfortunately, this strategy will not work. If we return to the paradox of Achilles, and focus on a given moment in the course of the runner’s journey, we can see that Achilles must both occupy a specific location at that moment, and also be beyond that location. If he were simply in the location, then he would never be able to move from it, and if he were simply beyond the location, then he would never occupy any position in space at all. Achilles is able to move only because he both occupies a given location and is already beyond it at every moment in the course of his run. Thus we cannot avoid the coexistence of contradictory properties by assigning them to different moments in time, because the contradiction is reproduced in any moment we choose.

The dialectical solution is simply to bite the bullet and accept the fact that contradictions are real, in the sense that the conflicting poles of the contradiction exist at one and the same time. They are implied by one another, or, as Engels will later say, they “interpenetrate.” But this very acceptance gets us out of our difficulty. The contradiction is in the world, rather than in our talk about the world (Bhaskar 1991, 110). There is nothing self-nullifying about the description of an actually existing contradiction. Our language can remain free of the formal contradictions traditional logic warns us against, and consistently describe the real contradictions of a world that is always in transition. There is no conflict between the logician’s law of non-contradiction, and the Hegelian principle of contradiction. They apply to different orders: one to the order of discourse, and the other to the order of reality. For Hegel, reality is a dynamic process and can only be comprehended as such. Hegel’s dialectic is not primarily a logic of statements, but a logic of things, or, better yet, a logic of processes. Its field of application is not what people say, but how reality changes.

Hegel’s second dialectical principle is his unique contribution to philosophy, the principle of the negation of the negation. We have seen that all earlier forms of dialectic involve negation, whether of an original discursive thesis, a dialectical postulate, or “hypothesis,” or the presupposition that motion is real. But Hegel’s principle of the negation of the negation goes beyond this. He reasons that, if the negation of an initial state produces a positive result, then the negation of that negation produces a positive result of a higher order. Hegelian dialectic is not only positive, it is cumulative and progressive.

We have been thinking only in the most general terms, but the devil is in the details – the Mephistophelean devil of Goethe’s Faust who says of himself, by way of introduction, “I am the spirit who negates.” Hegel’s brilliance as a philosopher lies not so much in his general dialectical principles as in the detailed and subtle way he applies them in accounting for transitions between different states.11 To take the initial transition of his philosophical system, the Science of Logic begins with the concept of Being, which appears at first to be the richest of all concepts, since anything and everything has Being (Hegel 1976, 82–156). But when we examine the concept more closely, we see that what appeared to be the richest of ideas is in fact the most vacuous. When we say that something has Being, we have said Nothing about it at all, Nothing that lends the thing we are speaking about a definite nature. So we are referred from the concept of Being to the concept of Nothing as its true meaning. We have arrived at our first negation, and our

44

first internal contradiction. Being and Nothing are the same. But now we shift our focus from the concepts themselves to the process of transition from the first to the second. Being has become Nothing. But the idea of Becoming is new. Thus the negation of Being as Nothing does not end in vacuity; it produces a new content. In Becoming, the opposition between Being and Nothing is superseded (aufgehoben) in the technical sense that it is preserved in its transcendence. The concept of Becoming includes suspended within itself the opposition between Being and Nothing that gave it birth, and without which it would have no meaning.

In the second transition of the Science of Logic, we encounter our first example of a negation of the negation. The concept of Becoming, on Hegel’s account, involves the idea of something that becomes something. Water becomes ice, the acorn becomes an oak, and so forth. The outcome of Becoming is always some definite thing. The concept of Becoming thus gives way to the concept of Determinate Being (Dasein). If Becoming is a result of the negation of Being, and Determinate Being a result of the negation of indeterminate Becoming, then Determinate Being is a result of the negation of the negation. The negation of the negation does not return us to our starting point, as though we had put two minus signs in front of a number. It produces a new content that is the cumulative result of the negations of each concept that preceded it. In the Science of

Logic, we proceed in this fashion from concept to concept by way of negation and the negation of the negation, until we finally arrive at the Absolute Idea that includes all earlier concepts as “moments,” or aspects, of its own self-expression.

Marx is a critic of Hegel’s dialectic, but he does not reject the concepts of internal contradiction, negation, the preservation of negated content in superseded form, or the idea of dialectic as a cumulative process. The problem with Hegel’s dialectic, from Marx’s point of view, is its idealist character. The problem is most apparent in the transition Hegel makes from the Science of Logic to the second division in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, the Philosophy of Nature. As we have seen, the Science of Logic culminates in the Absolute Idea. But how does the Absolute Idea make the transition from logical abstraction to the Idea’s first concrete illustration in the manifold phenomena of Nature?

Hegel gives his answer to this question at the end of the Science of Logic. The “transition” from the Absolute Idea to Nature is no transition at all, since every transition in logic only arrives at yet another logical determination:

The passage is therefore to be understood here rather in this manner, that the Idea freely releases itself in its absolute self-assurance and inner poise. By reason of this freedom, the form of its determinateness is also absolutely free – the externality of space and time existing absolutely on its own account without the moment of subjectivity. (Hegel 1976, 843) The emergence of Nature is the result of an act of freedom on the part of the

Absolute Idea. Feuerbach had already criticized Hegel’s account of this passage as nothing more than a philosopher’s version of the Christian doctrine that God creates the world ex nihilo through his own free decision. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx endorses Feuerbach’s view that Hegel’s philosophy is “religion rendered into thought” (Marx 1976, 172). But he also sees in Hegel the beginnings of a dialectic liberated from

45

theology, which is to say, from any reference to a Being that transcends humanity and nature.

Marx claims that Hegel made real advances in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the introduction to his philosophical system, by adopting the standpoint of modern political economy:

He grasps labor as the essence of man… Labor is man’s coming-to-be for

himself within alienation, or as alienated man (Marx 1976, 177). The problem, however, is that Hegel understands labor only as “abstract mental

labor,” i.e. as the labor of the person who thinks. From this point of view, nature is necessarily misunderstood as a product of thinking, or, in Hegel’s language, as a self-externalization of the Absolute Idea. For Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology is a genuine advance in that it grasps “the dialectic of negativity as a moving and generating principle” (Marx 1976, 177). But in identifying labor with purely mental activity, Hegel fails to understand it as the activity of man as an objective, natural being. As a consequence, he also fails to understand the true character of alienation, which lies, not in the fact that human beings objectify themselves in the product of their work (as natural beings they must do so), but rather in the fact that such objectification occurs under specific (and alterable) social conditions, resulting in the loss of the object and its conversion into an alien force.

In Marx’s critique of Hegel’s dialectic, we can see the theme of the division of labor as the root of ideology operating a year in advance of its explicit articulation in the German Ideology. From the viewpoint of the later text, Hegel’s dialectic is ideological in that it uncritically presupposes the division between mental and manual labor, while blissfully occupying the mental side of that divide. In this sense, we might also say that Hegel’s dialectic rests on a fundamentally non-dialectical foundation, since it grasps only one side of the contradiction that underlies it. Marx does not proceed in the Manuscripts to work out what a defensible version of dialectic would look like, except to say that it would adopt the true standpoint of human self-creation, that of the reciprocal relationship between the humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity.

Marx does not take up the theme of the meaning of dialectic again until the publication of the second edition of Capital, Volume 1, nearly three decades later. At this point, his main task is not to criticize dialectic, but to defend it against the contemporary crop of German philosophers who rejected it in its entirety.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years

ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Capital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker… (Marx 1992, 102-103). Marx contrasts his version of the dialectic with the Hegelian one:

46

My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought (Marx 1992, 102). This passage was to create considerable epistemological difficulty for later Marxists,

since its use of the word “reflection” seems to endorse a naive copy theory of knowledge. Lenin in particular was misled by this. But Marx is not trying to develop an epistemology in this text. Instead he is articulating his criticism of Hegel in terms very similar to those of the 1844 Manuscripts. Hegelian dialectic is idealist in that it makes the Absolute Idea the demiurge of the real world. However:

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means

prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell (Marx 1992, 103). In his essay, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” Althusser made this passage

the theme of one of his most important contributions to Marxist thought by questioning the meaning of the mixed metaphor in which Marxist dialectic involves an act of “turning” Hegel’s dialectic “right side up,” and an extraction of its “rational kernel” from “the mystical shell” (Althusser 1970). The conclusion he arrives at is that this peculiar operation of inversion-extraction leaves little of Hegel’s dialectic intact. Both Hegel and Marx operate with concepts of the totality, which it is the purpose of dialectic to fathom. But Hegel’s is an “expressive totality,” while Marx’s is a ‘’structural” one. For Hegel, the whole of his system is present in every contradiction as its inner essence. Every stage of the dialectic is an organic expression of the Hegelian system as a whole, or, differently put, a manifestation of the Absolute Idea at a particular phase in its development. But Marx’s conceptualization of society on the architectural model of foundation and superstructure is quite different. It is the idea of a totality of heterogeneous levels connected by the causal relation of “determination in the last instance” by the foundational level. The facts of history are not expressions of an organic whole, but rather the results of an intersection of causal factors, determined in the last instance by the conflict, or as we now must say, the contradiction, between the forces and relations of production. In the context of this insight, Althusser introduces the theme of the overdetermination of contradiction with reference to Lenin. Lenin accounted for the outbreak of revolution in backward Russia instead of the advanced capitalist nations of the West with his theory of the weakest link. Russia was that point in the chain of imperialist nations at which the greatest number of contradictions converged: those between workers and capitalists in heavy industry; between peasants and landowners in the countryside; between the most advanced industrial enterprises in the world and the most medieval relations in the rural areas; between the Tsarist autocracy and the demands

47

for shared power of the big bourgeoisie; between imperialist war and the desire for peace; between a backward clergy and an advanced intelligentsia; and so on. The condensation of these contradictions at a single point – for which Althusser appropriates the Freudian term “overdetermination” – is what broke the Russian link in the imperialist chain. According to Althusser, like the concept of structural causality, the concept of the overdetermination of contradiction is nowhere to be found in Hegel’s dialectic. The two ideas, however, comprise a uniquely Marxist understanding of the nature of dialectical change.

On the whole, Althusser’s argument is persuasive, but with two provisos. The first is that there is more continuity between Hegel’s dialectic and that of Marx than Althusser admits. Whether the dialectic is expressive or structural, it involves the idea that contradiction and negation are responsible for change, and that change is cumulative in character. The fact that change is cumulative does not mean that it is teleological, that it is determined by a pre-given end. Althusser is correct when he rejects the notion that history, for Marx, is guided by the realization of a final condition. Althusser’s definition of history as a “process without a goal” captures Marx’s intention well, at least to the extent that it distinguishes between the materialist dialectic and any form of teleology. But the Marxist dialectic is cumulative nonetheless, and its cumulative character is assured by what Marx identifies as the refusal of human beings to give up advances in their ability to satisfy their needs: “the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces” (Marx 1963, 122). Without that refusal to go backward willingly, there would be no conflict between forces and relations of production, and the foundation of “structural causality” would crumble. The second proviso is that, without the idea of determination in the last instance, the concept of overdetermination can easily lead to a “post-Marxist” or “postmodernist” view which, in the name of a celebration of difference, sees history as the result of the unordered interaction of multiple diverse forces. Althusser exhibited a tendency in this direction, asserting at one point that “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never arrives” (Althusser 170, 113). But to take this assertion seriously is to give up any meaningful version of Marxist dialectic.

Marx, on the other hand, was convinced of the underlying causal primacy of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, a contradiction that must eventually explode in periods of social revolution. This revolutionary conception is finally what defines dialectic for Marx. We turn again to the preface to the second edition of the first volume of Capital:

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it

seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary (Marx 1992, 103).

48

The mystified form of dialectic that transfigures and glorifies the existing social

order is that of Hegel, at least in the period of his maturity. The thesis that Hegel articulates in the Philosophy of History, and that Francis Fukuyama revived immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, is that history has come to an end (Fukuyama 1992). This does not mean, of course, that nothing will ever transpire again, but rather that historical change will never produce a new form of social organization, since the existing condition of society – capitalism and representative government – is the one in which human freedom has finally come to full expression. The thesis of the end of history is linked to Hegel’s idealism, since the Absolute Idea sets out on an excursion that returns to its starting point because that starting point, properly understood, always included its destination in the first place. History is the unfolding of a content that is implicit in its beginning. There is nothing new under the sun. The Hegelian dialectic moves in a circle from which it never deviates and in which beginning and end are indistinguishable. The achievement of Absolute Knowledge is no more than the recognition that this is so. It is a cognitive acquiescence in the state of things as they are and even as they have been in the past, the abandonment of the “ought” that impotently condemns the existing state of affairs, and the recognition that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational” (Hegel 1952, 10).12

For Marx, on the other hand, there is no end to history. In the Economic and

Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he says that even communism is not the end, and suggests that yet other forms of social organization lie beyond it (Marx 1976, 146). For Marx, history has no telos, no final condition toward which it is heading. In The German

Ideology, he tells us that the later social form is not the reason why the earlier social form came into existence, and that it is only from the perspective of the present that the past seems to be a preparation for its own arrival (Marx 1970, 57-58). History has no end that orders its multitude of events, but it does have a direction. That direction is the one prescribed by the advance of the productive forces of society – human knowledge and skill as well as technology – which is in turn the result of people’s refusal to abandon their hard-won triumphs over scarcity and the realm of necessity. Nothing guarantees the success of that human project. On the contrary, as Engels points out in Dialectics of

Nature, in the long run it is bound to fail (Engels 1977, 62). The universe began without humanity and it will end without it. The development of the productive forces will cease when the species those forces belong to no longer exists. Until that day, however, the human attempt to conquer natural and social necessity, scarcity, and avoidable suffering, and thereby enter into the realm of genuine freedom, is the only thing that gives our species a direction and a meaning.

For Marx, the dialectic of human history is open-ended. It is a spiral, not a circle. It even sometimes reverses direction, since a phase of the class struggle may end, as Marx says in The Communist Manifesto, “in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx and Engels 2012, 35) and a consequent regression in the level of the productive forces (as it did, for example, with the Fall of Rome and the onset of the Dark Age). But as long as humanity continues to exist, its dark ages will come to an end, and people will find the main thread of their history once again. Marx is certainly an heir to the Enlightenment idea of progress, but in him that idea also has a tragic overtone. One of his most brilliant dialectical insights is that “history progresses by its bad side,” since the productive forces

49

have developed at the expense of uncountable numbers of people who have been condemned to poverty, humiliation, and exhausting labor (Marx 1963, 121). That is the condition that socialists and communists struggle to end. But if they are successful at some point in the future, their success will bring to a conclusion, not the history of our species, but its pre-history, the long period in which we have been unable to control the forces we have unleashed. According to Marx, this means that, for the first time, we will make our history consciously instead of experiencing it as a fate that befalls us. The achievement of this consciousness does not mean, as it does for Hegel, that the Absolute Idea will return to itself in us as Spirit. Consciousness is only one of the powers of humankind, and, like all such powers, it is limited. The human species does not take the place of the Absolute that Hegel believed he had found. Marx’s dialectic proceeds in full awareness of our irremediable contingency and finitude.

Marx intended to produce an article explaining dialectic in two or three pages, just as soon as the pressure of his work on Capital permitted, but he never got around to writing the piece. The task fell to Engels, as he attempted to convey the nature of the dialectic to the workers’ movement in the aftermath of Marx’s death. Given the fact that Engels was not writing for philosophers, it is understandable that the idea of dialectic underwent simplification at his hands. In the Dialectics of Nature, Anti-Duhring, Ludwig Feuerbach

and the End of Classical German Philosophy, and related writings, Engels accomplished three tasks that were to have a far-reaching influence on the subsequent history of Marxism. He drew a distinction between idealist and materialist “worldviews” (Weltanschauungen), while identifying Marxism as a dialectical version of materialism;13 he developed the thesis that there is a dialectic of nature as well as a dialectic of society; and he identified three “laws” of the dialectic.

The first innovation was the one that was the most unfortunate in its historical consequences. Marx had never sought to develop a “worldview;” that is, a comprehensive conception of the nature of the world as a whole. His theoretical project lay, rather, in the development of a materialist theory of history, especially the part of that theory concerned with understanding the capitalist mode of production. He described his project as a “scientific” endeavor, but this meant above all that it was open to criticism and reevaluation. Like any science, it had to meet the highest standards of theoretical consistency and explanatory power, and it was open to refutation and revision in part by means of empirical test. Such testing, of course, is far different and more complicated than the experimental tests of the physical sciences, but the main point remains. The materialist science of history is open and non-dogmatic. The “dialectical materialist worldview” by contrast is a settled dogma, and it came to play a role very similar to the role played by dogma in church denominations. It served to distinguish between the faithful and the heretics, a function that finally became the province of a kind of “socialist” priesthood, in the form of the upper echelons of the Party bureaucracy. This, of course, was never Engels’ intention. He wanted to present the workers’ movement with a view of the world that was easily understood, and that would draw a line between that movement and its class enemy. The fact remains, however, that he took the first step in the creation of an orthodoxy that, in the Stalinist period, would be defended by the equivalent of burning at the stake.

Though Engels’ project to develop a dialectical theory of nature was not shared by Marx, Marx was aware of Engels’ efforts, and there is no evidence that he objected to

50

them. If dialectic is an expression of the fluid, dynamic, and transitory character of its subject matter, then there would seem to be no reason to exclude a dialectic of nature from Marxism, provided that it remain as open to critical reformulation as the dialectic of human history. The question of whether the dialectic belongs only to society or to nature as well became a contentious topic in twentieth-century Marxism through the writings of Sartre, who argued that only society is dialectical. It does not appear that Marx would have agreed with them.14

The three laws of dialectic that Engels identifies are: The law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; The law of the interpenetration of opposites; and The law of the negation of the negation (Engels 1977, 62). We will consider the first law last, since it is the only one that does not figure

prominently in Marx’s own discussions of dialectic. The second law, that of the interpenetration of opposites, is a restatement of the

concept of internal contradiction. The opposite poles of a dialectical contradiction do not simply coexist or oppose each another as external forces. They imply one another (they interpenetrate) and so constitute a unitary, dynamic formation, a conflictual whole caught up in a process of transition. This law is common to Hegel’s and Marx’s versions of dialectic.

The third law is also common to Hegel and the mature Marx. For both thinkers, the negation of the negation is the principle that ensures that dialectic has a progressively developmental character, in which each stage both results in a new content, and preserves the contents of the stages that preceded it, though in superseded form. Although Marx seems to reject this law in his early, Feuerbachian phase (endorsing instead, in the 1844 Manuscripts, Feuerbach’s search for a “positive” foundation for philosophy), the later Marx came to embrace the negation of the negation as a condition of the progressivity of dialectic, as is evident in the Grundrisse, Capital, and sundry reflections on the materialist theory of history.

By contrast, the first law does not play much of a role in Marx’s thinking at all, and while it appears in Hegel, it is limited to only one phase of dialectical development. The law of the reciprocal transition between quantity and quality comes from the first of the three parts of Hegel’s Science of Logic, “The Doctrine of Being,” and specifically the section that discusses Quantity and Measure. As such, it is not a universal principle of Hegel’s dialectic, which also includes the “Doctrine of Essence” and the “Doctrine of the Notion,” in both of which the law plays no role. The general idea is easy enough to grasp. When quantity constitutes a progressively varying series, there are “nodal points” along the series in which gradual quantitative changes pass over into abrupt qualitative ones. An obvious example is that of water, which freezes at zero degrees Celsius and boils at 100 degrees. Between these nodal points, temperature can be raised or lowered without any qualitative change in the liquid state of the water. The reason why Engels elevates this principle to the status of a general law derives from his project to develop a dialectical theory of nature. The idea of a transition from quantity to quality and the reverse is especially useful in the physical sciences, most obviously in the science of chemistry. Since the dialectic of nature did not attract Marx’s theoretical interest, there is

51

no mystery why the first law receives no emphasis in his work. Still, in the adventures of the dialectic following Engels’ death, the first law came to play an important role in conceptualizing the historical “nodal point” at which a slowly developing series of quantitative change explodes in the form of a qualitative, revolutionary leap into a new social and economic formation.

In any event, Engels’ treatment of the dialectic, including the three laws, had a powerful influence on the more or less reformist thinkers of the Second International, and through them, on the revolutionary thinkers of the Third International, created in the aftermath of the October Revolution. But it would be wrong to assume that reflection on dialectic after Engels was confined to the memorization of a received catechism. Lenin, for one, studied dialectic in Marx’s and Hegel’s own writings, and made copious notes on the Science of Logic, which were published shortly after his death under the title, Philosophical Notebooks (Lenin 1976). The conceptual sophistication of the Notebooks throws into disarray the distinction that was commonly drawn in the West in the 1960s and 1970s between a crude Soviet Marxism, and the more philosophically respectable Hegelian Marxism of such thinkers as Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, and Adorno. In fact, Lenin was the first “Hegelian Marxist,” in that he took Hegel’s dialectic seriously as a precursor of the dialectic of Marx (Anderson 1995).

Eisenstein was not a philosopher, but he read Engels, Marx, and Lenin. His dialectical theory and practice of montage represents an advance in the history of Marxism, for it is the first aesthetic version of the dialectic, or, more precisely, the first version of the dialectic as an artistic form. But if his theory is an impressive innovation, it is not an anomaly. It is continuous with the whole tradition of Marxist reflection on the nature of dialectic. What made the theory possible in the first place was Eisenstein’s experience with film as an art of motion, transition, and other forms of change. We will be considering that theory in detail soon.

Inventory

Before we turn to the avant-garde Soviet filmmakers, it may be helpful to draw up an inventory of the concepts Marx developed that will guide our studies of early Soviet cinema, Italian neorealism, the works of Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group, and the revolutionary cinema of Latin American.

First, no Marxist approach to cinema can neglect the fact that, in capitalist society, cinema is an industry the purpose of which is to maximize return on investment. For this purpose, and in spite of the persistence of craft-like elements, movie-making is organized as an industrial process involving the sequential processing of raw material by machines. The cost of production, and the need to attract investors' money, in concert with the corporate media-based critical and promotional apparatuses, limit the social and political content of mainstream films to ideas that do not challenge the foundations of capitalism. Profit maximization creates a pressure to produce standardized, minimally challenging films with simple narrative content, and with high visual and auditory production values. Low budget independent movies may be able to minimize these pressures and limitations, but normally (though not always) at the price of drawing small audiences and little critical notice.

52

Second, when applied to cinema, the concept of ideology that Marx introduced in 1845 suggests that all films are ideological in that they involve the division between mental and manual labor in the sphere of both filmmaking and society as a whole. It also suggests that the vast majority of films will express the point of view of the dominant class, though different films may express the conflicting views of different fractions of that class. Perhaps the most powerful expression of the dominant ideology is its naturalization of historically variable social relations. A Marxian critique of film would seek to strip away this naturalist illusion in order to reveal the social forces it masks. Under the right social and political conditions, however, films may be made that express the ideological view or views of subordinate classes. This, of course, has important implications for the conduct of class struggles. Since ideologies belong to the superstructure of society, we expect them, on Marxist grounds, to be conditioned by the material foundation of society, and especially by the dynamic conflict between the forces and relations of production. Research ought to be able to determine the nature of this conditioning in the case of individual films as well as specific movements in the history of cinema.

Third, as an art form, cinema provides us with the opportunity to test Marx's thesis that the senses are historically shaped. Changes in their nature ought to occur in or around periods of major social transition, and cinema was born in precisely such a period, namely that of the Industrial Revolution and its associated processes of urbanization. Benjamin's version of Marx's thesis involves the emergence of a collective subject of cinematic experience, and an orientation that both registers perceptual content in a state of distraction, and submits that content to the evaluative attitude of the expert. Other forms of sensory reshaping during the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism may well have occurred, and, if so, need to be theorized.15

Fourth, the status of film as a commodity is related to its aesthetic character in two ways. The first concerns the commodification of mainstream, commercial film as a product of what Adorno calls the culture industry. The second concerns the reification of film as an autonomous work of art. Reification in the second sense involves the perfection of the fetish character of the cinematic work as a thing that is hermetically withdrawn from society, but nonetheless mirrors social forces. Since the internal resources of the autonomous film are immediately social in character – they are products of the development of the cinematographic forces of production in their relation to aesthetic form – the filmmaker has the ability to express the "untruth" of capitalism without tendentiousness or propaganda. According to Adorno, the destructiveness and failure of capitalism to meet human needs can be expressed in "the coded language of suffering" of the artistic form itself. That ought to be just as possible in a film by Resnais or Junco as in a play by Samuel Beckett. Though Adorno would have winced at the idea, we should also not exclude the possibility of hybrids between commercial and autonomous cinema under the appropriate historical conditions. Strictly speaking, recognition of these two dimensions of the film as commodity is more Adorno’s contribution than that of Marx himself. Still, it is reasonable to see Adorno’s innovative aesthetic reflections as drawing out the implications of Marx’s work, since they are rooted in the analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital, even though Marx himself never applied that analysis directly to aesthetic ends.

Fifth, since cinema is that visual art that creates and shapes moving images, its

53

primary theme is motion, transition, and change in general. These are the properties of social reality that are at the center of Marx’s concept of dialectic. For Marx, the purpose of dialectical theory is to penetrate the surface appearance that existing social conditions are natural, eternal, and unchangeable by uncovering their fluid, transitional character. It does this by revealing the internal contradictions that prepare the way for a qualitative break with the past, and a transition to a fundamentally new form of society. If “dialectic is in its essence critical and revolutionary,” then there is nothing astonishing about the fact that a revolutionary Marxist cinema took dialectical form in its first appearance, that of the Soviet avant-garde.

1 The following account of the technical history of cinema is based primarily on three sources: From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (Robinson 1996); The

Cine goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (Abel 1998); and Film Art: An

Introduction (Bordwell and Thompson 1986). 2 I have altered the translation. The German text reads: Es ist nur das bestimmte

gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier für sie die

phantasmagorische Form eines Verhältnisses von Dingen annimmt (Marx and Engels 1962, 86). In the English translation, phantasmagorische is translated as “fantastic.” But then, of course, Marx’s metaphor is lost. 3 Though it appeared before Avatar was completed and released, Michael Cieply’s article in the November 8, 2009 issue of the New York Times, “A Movie’s Budget Pops from the Screen,” includes an illuminating discussion of the economics of the film, including costs of production and distribution, and return to investors. 4 In the Preface to his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza writes: “Granted, then, that the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honor, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man” (Spinoza 1998, 3). 5 An excellent selection of writings by the Young Hegelians has been published in English as The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Stepelevitch 1983). 6 The German text is in Marx and Engels 1967, 463. 7 The pursuit of the “fine print” seems to refute the idea that every copy of a photograph is equivalent to every other copy. But we might argue that the fine print is an attempt to approximate the hand-made quality of a painting or drawing, in the interest of maximizing the price of the photograph. In that sense, the fine print is not genuinely photographic at all, and so does not refute the idea of equivalence. 8 Adorno related the story to Jürgen Habermas, who gives a brief account of it in his essay, “Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity – Self-Affirmation Gone Wild” (Habermas 1983, 99). I have included relevant details about the film that Habermas does not mention. 9 The phrase, “commodities on display,” is not Benjamin’s. Susan Buck-Morss introduces it in her treatment of the Arcades Project, The Dialectics of Seeing, in order to distinguish between Marx’s interest in commodities as they exchange on the market, and Benjamin’s

54

focus on commodities as representations that enthrall the urban masses (Buck-Morss 1989, 81-82). 10 In explaining “appearances of motion” (Bewegunderscheinungen), Wertheimer writes, “ … it is not sufficient to refer to purely peripheral processes involving the individual eye; there must be recourse to operations that lie behind the retina" … (Wertheimer 1912, 246). My translation. 11 The well-known Hegelian, John N. Findlay, emphasized this point in his seminars on Hegel at Boston University, which I attended in the late 1970s. 12 For Hegel, not everything that exists is “actual.” When William Krug challenged Schelling to deduce Krug’s pen from the general principles of his system, Hegel replied in defense of his friend and collaborator at the time that the deduction would be possible as soon as Krug’s pen acquired any philosophical significance. For Hegel, what is actual is what has a place in the process through which the Absolute Spirit (the Absolute Idea as expressed in art, religion, and philosophy) returns to itself from its being-outside-itself. Yet, this does not mitigate the conformist element in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, because his purpose in the book is to demonstrate that the modern nation-state is the ultimate stage in the development of Spirit on the level of social and political life. It is not only actual and therefore rational; it is unsurpassable as well. 13 Engels did not coin the term, “dialectical materialism.” That was left to the early Russian Marxist, Georgi Plekhanov. 14 George Lukács is often identified with Sartre in denying that nature is dialectical apart from humankind, but this identification is a mistake. A close reading of the relevant passages in History and Class Consciousness indicates that Lukács regards nature-in-itself as objectively dialectical, though lacking in the subject-object relation that characterizes the dialectic of human history and nature insofar as it plays a role in that history. 15 In this regard, Marxists should not overlook the work of Marshall McLuhan, in spite of his technological determinism, or that of more recent media theorists.