Benjamin reversed his earlier view that hermetic avant-garde art serves revolution

Evidence

In his article On the Social Position of Music' in the first issue of the journal, Adorno had emphasized that music would fulfil its social function best if it marched forward in the immanent development of its problems, without gazing outwards towards society, and did not allow itself to be inhibited by the state of consciousness of the proletariat. The proletariat was crippled by class domination. In this Adorno was merely maintaining what he had once learned from Benjamin himself. In 1928, in One-Way Street, dedicated to the communist and one-time director of a trade union agitprop theatre, Asja Lacis, Benjamin had written about the current relevance of what Mallarmé, monadically, in his hermetic room, had discovered through a pre-established harmony with all the decisive events of our times in economics, technology, and public life’. Now, at the end of his essay, Benjamin had asserted the opposite. The only audience for the most advanced and daring products of the avant-garde in any of the arts had been the upper middle classes. What mattered, howeverand the surrealists had taken this point seriouslywas to put intellectuals in their proper place as technicians by putting their technology at the disposal of the proletariat: only the proletariat was dependent on the most advanced state of technology. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 778 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Yet the transposition is not without its difficulties, and Benjamin’s conclusions remain problematical, particularly in his unresolved, ambiguous attitude toward modern industrial civilization, which seems to have fascinated him as much as it depressed him. The problem of propaganda in art can be solved, he maintains, by attention, not so much to the content of the work of art, as to its form: a progressive work of art is one which utilizes the most advanced artistic techniques, one in which, therefore, the artist lives his activity as a technician, and through this technical work finds a unity of purpose with the industrial worker. “The solidarity of the specialist with the proletariat … can never be anything but a mediated one.” This Communist “politization of art,” which he opposed to the Fascist “aesthetization of the machine,” was designed to harness to the cause of revolution that modernism to which other Marxist critics (Lukács, for instance) were hostile. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Adorno and Benjamin reversed positions on whether avant-garde art should court the proletariat — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 778; Benjamin theorized progressive art as technically advanced form, not political content — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171

Related

• Adorno and Benjamin reversed positions on whether avant-garde art should court the proletariat (similarity 0.95)
• Benjamin theorized progressive art as technically advanced form, not political content (similarity 0.87)
• Adorno saw Benjamin’s Marxist side as an un-Benjaminian artifact of Brecht’s influence. (similarity 0.84)
• Benjamin and Adorno both located hope in traditional art’s decay and disenchantment (similarity 0.83)
• Adorno’s blanket dismissal of mass art matched Benjamin’s overpraise in one-sidedness (similarity 0.82)
• Benjamin saw distracted mass reception as politically radicalizing (similarity 0.82)
• Adorno and Benjamin diverged on whether Marxism solved or truncated problems (similarity 0.82)
• Technically advanced art can only achieve politically mediated effects (similarity 0.82)
• Adorno and Benjamin independently converged on the same cultural-critique objects from opposite directions (similarity 0.81)
• Benjamin rejected the autonomy of intellectuals, siding with the proletariat over Geist. (similarity 0.81)
• Adorno and Benjamin’s aesthetic-modernist reading displaced the bourgeois-culture reading at the Institute. (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno faulted Benjamin for underestimating commodity-fetish power and dialectical mediations (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno saw mass art as reconciling audiences to the status quo, unlike Benjamin. (similarity 0.79)
• Adorno rejected the immediate mapping of art content onto economic social history (similarity 0.79)
• Adorno’s critique of Benjamin charged him with un-Marxist psychologizing (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Adorno and Benjamin reversed positions on whether avant-garde art should court the proletariat #corroborates (0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 778
• Benjamin theorized progressive art as technically advanced form, not political content #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171