A couple weeks ago I posted on Trotsky and zoe. As part of an ongoing project reading socialist modernism through its capacity to re-imagine human-animal relations I've got some short comments on Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." This might seem like a stretch but I think it is important to see not only how animals function on the surface of revolutionary discourse (as in Trotsky) but also how they operate in the depth structures of Marxism.

Benjamin’s opening observation is that the fetish value of the work of art in the bourgeois regime of visibility derives from its uniqueness, and specifically its unique history as an object (its aura). The scarcity of the unique creates a form of fetish value the bourgeoisie recognize as art. Opposed to the auratic work of art is the mechanically reproduced work: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it [the original] happens to be.” Thus the aura of the reproduced work “withers” as it becomes accessible to the masses.

The non-auratic work is a new object requiring new perceptive faculties: “The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well,” and so the sensorium is fundamentally reorganized to account for photography and film. The “liquidation” of the auratic work of art is not limited to the domain of aesthetics, but bears with it physiological and ultimately historical-ontological changes for the human being. The coming-into-being of the non-auratic work of art is a sign of the new human that will be able to respond to this object.

The political meaning of the shift from a regime of art that reproduces class division to one corrosive to class also introduces the role of a sacrificial animal in the relation between imageness and class. Benjamin begins at the dawn of images: “The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.” Even in this originary work of art we find the two categories that will be create the schism of the mechanically reproduced object: “Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work.“ The cult value is that taken up by bourgeois art fetishism, whereas the exhibitory value is that which speaks to a mass audience and which is realized in mechanical reproducibility. Thus for the non-cultic, non-auratic type of art, “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

There is a risk of conflating Lascaux with Notre Dame and the massive differences surrounding their productions, but this is precisely what Benjamin (following Marx’s equally expansive narrative of the emergence of capital) requires us to consider--not the erasure of history between these points, but the possibility of its continuity. The magical thinking of animal sacrifice makes possible the priestly caste--the most pathetic and dangerous class, according to Nietzsche--and which allows for truth operations to be expropriated from laborers. Benjamin’s story shows that the separation of the cultural or ideological sphere of social life from public access occurs through a sacrificial logic that ultimately refers to animal bodies. Such animal bodies might be literally nonhuman animals, but in the dis-enchanted world of modernity they are more likely humans-as-animals, the workers that Marx sees reduced to animal life especially in his early humanist writings. It follows from this identification that if there is a mode of art that is politics, it comes at the expense of secrecy and magic in the killing of animals. The return of the proletariat to properly human life requires either a primitive regression to blood sacrifice--but this takes us into fascism, and at any rate is anti-dialectical--or a new relation between humans, animals, and the visibility of violence.