The Art of Profane
Illumination
One of the great unfinished tasks of twentieth-
century marxian theory has been to write a materialist
history of the senses. How have the senses been organized
by relations of production and exchange? How in
particular have they been organized under capitalism?
And how has this organization shaped capitalistsociety' s
cultural pursuits?
The problematic of the senses is a central issue
structuring Walter Benjamin's work on industrial
capitalist modernity from the late 1920s to his death.1
Although it is never articulated in coherent form, it
underwrites his essays on the impact of mechanical
reproduction on the production and reception of the art
work, on the fate of storytelling in the modern age, on
the consequences of "a change in the structure of
[readers'] experience" for lyric poetry since the mid-
nineteenth century.2 The problematic of the senses also
plays a central role in the bundles of notes constituting
the arcades project. Notably, it structures Benjamin's
interest in the specific sensuous practices of Paris,
capital of nineteenth-century modernity, ranging from
the eating habits of its inhabitants and the way the
streets were lit to the kind of poetry it produced and the
seductive phenomenology of the commodity form. The
following essay investigates how an interest in a
materialist hi story of the senses also informs Benjamin s
understanding of the historical avant-garde. It argues
that for Benjamin, the effort to overcome the negative
consequences of industrial capitalist modernity on sense
perception is a fundamental component of the avant-
garde gesture.
44 Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994
MARGARET COHEN
Benjamin articulates his understanding of avant-
garde activity most succinctly in the 1929 "Surrealism
- The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia."
Describing the importance of the surrealist movement,
Benjamin sees it to lie in the pursuit of something he
terms "experience [Erfahrung]." "This is not the place
to give an exact definition of Surrealist experience,"
Benjamin writes. "But anyone who has perceived that
the writings of this circle are not literature but something
else - demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs,
forgeries if you will, but at any rate not literature - will
also know, for the same reason, that the writings are
concerned literally with experiences, not with theories
and still less with phantasms."3 In this statement,
Benjamin values surrealism for its transgression of
traditional aesthetic categories which, following
surrealism, he sums up with the word "literature."
Inspired by Benjamin, Peter Burger has conceptualized
surrealist transgression as an effort to collapse the
distinction between art and life. According to Burger,
surrealism (like the avant-garde more generally) seeks
to dismantle the autonomy characterizing the institution
of art in bourgeois society, "its (relative) independence
in the face of demands that it be socially useful."4 But
to understand fully Benjamin's interest in surrealist
transgression, it is important to recall the significance
of "experience" throughout Benjamin's thought.
"Experience" does not designate the economico-political
real outside the institutional boundaries of bourgeois
art. Rather, Benjamin uses it to designate a form of life
that modernity has brought to an end. Benjamin's
Visual A nth ropo/ogy Review
social positioning of the aesthetic may thus not be as
different from the bourgeois notion of art as it initially
seems. To paraphrase Lukacs of the Theory of the
Novel, Benjamin sees avant-garde art to say "and yet"
to life, although he dreams that this "and yet" will itself
be of social use.
Following his turn to Marxism in the mid-1920s,
Benjamin uses Erfahrung to describe a state where
there is no opposition between subject and surrounding
world.5 The term describes a harmonious intercourse
between the subject and the cosmos to which Benjamin
gives two different horizontal locations. In One-Way
Street, published in 1928, one year before his surrealism
essay, Benjamin writes, "Nothing distinguishes the
ancient from the modern man so much as the former's
absorption in acosmic experience [Erfahrung] scarcely
known to later periods." The "ancients intercourse
with the cosmos" takes the form of "the ecstatic trance
[Rausch]. For it is in this experience alone that we gain
certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is
remotest to us, and never of one without the other."6
Benjamin here associates the alienation of subject from
the cosmos with the rational disenchantment of the
world worked by the advent of science and technology.
He aligns this alienation with an impoverishment of the
subject's sensuous access to the external world. "Its
[experience's] waning is marked by the flowering of
astronomy at the beginning of the modern age...the
exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the
universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained
a portent of what was to come."7 In the scientific age,
humans give preeminence to the sense of vision rather
than absorbing the cosmos through all sensuous means.
At other moments, Benjamin locates the decline of
experience in the nineteenth century. In the essay on
Baudelaire,Benjamin attributes the alienation of subject
from cosmos to numerous aspects of industrial
capitalism. He dwells in particular on the vicissitudes
of life in the urban metropolis and the alienation of labor
and rationalization of time resulting from industrial
means of production. Benjamin once more isolates the
alienation of the senses as a consequence of this
distancing. The "inhospitable, blinding age of big-
scale industrialism" creates multiple forms of sensory
MARGARET COHEN IS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. HER PUBLICATIONS
INCLUDE PROFANE ILLUMINATION: WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE PARIS OF SURREALIST REVOLUMTION. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIIA
PRESS. 1993.
Visual Anthropology Review
overload which lead the subject to block out the external
world.8 In contrast to One-Way Street, the Baudelaire
essay no longer isolates vision as an accomplice of
modernity. Rather, Vision too becomes a victim of
modern life.
This situation, Benjamin observes, presents great
difficulties to anyone who engages in aesthetic
production. The aesthetic is deeply bound up in sensory
activity, both in its production and reception. But in
damaged modernity, the subject only enters into
sensuous contact with the cosmos when his efforts at
protecting himself against sensory overload fail.
Benjamin terms the moment of this failure
Chockerfahrung, a term which contains the word
Erfahrung indicating the subject's exchange with the
cosmos. But Chockerfahrung is a painful modern
version of happy antique exchange. The moment when
the modern subject opens his/her senses to external
reality is the negative experience of shock, far removed
from the appreciation of the beautiful that aesthetics
traditionally puts at the basis of the creation and reception
of art. In the Baudelaire essay, Benjamin suggests
Baudelaire's importance to lie in the ability of his
poetry to take account of the shock-like quality of
modern life. Benjamin isolates two fundamental
movements in Baudelaire s work, spleen and ideal. In
the moment of spleen, Baudelaire stages the
"disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock"
for his readers.9 In the moment of ideal, Baudelaire
dreams of a world where the alienation of subject from
his/her surroundings would be overcome: "'Nature is a
temple whose living pillars/Sometimes give forth a
babel of words;/Man wends his way through forests of
symbols/Which look at him with their familiar
glances.'"10
Longing for the subject's reintegration with the
cosmos, Baudelaire is on the threshold of the avant-
garde project as conceptualized by Benjamin. But
while Baudelaire couches his longing in traditional
aesthetic form and endows it with an affect of regret,
surrealism displaces this longing to an open-ended
realm of creative experimentation. Benjamin pays
particular attention to surrealist performance art, street
Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994 45
wanderings, collective experiments with intoxication,
hypnotism, sleep-talking, drawings and writings. With
these activities, the surrealists actively seek to bring
into being a world beyond the alienation of subject from
cosmos. For they challenge an aesthetic consequence
of this alienation: the conceptualization of art as a
dialectic between autonomous object and subject,
whether the subject is conceptualized as viewer or
artist. This dialectic takes one of two basic forms. One
form is the relation Michel Foucault describes in his
celebrated reading of Velasquez's Las Meninas. The
play around the mirror in this painting is crucial to
Foucault. "This artifice both conceals and indicates
another vacancy...that of the painter and the spectator
when they are looking at or composing the
picture...there...indicatedcompellingly from every side,
is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that
which is the foundation of representation - of the
person it [the representation] resembles and the person
in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very
subject - which is the same - has been elided. And
representation, freed finally from the relation that was
impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure
form."11
If Foucault attributes this notion of representation
to the classical episteme, the subject/object dialectic
characterizing the art object in modernity also takes
inverted form. In the Romantic critique of classicism,
the relation between subject and scene for which s/he is
the necessary but elided precondition is made manifest.
We can take as emblem of the Romantic inversion of
Foucault's classical notion of representation Kaspar
David Friedrich's 1818 Wanderer Gazing Out Over a
Sea of Ice. Here the subject constituting the
representation is no longer the invisible blind spot on
this side of the painting, the artist and spectator hidden
by the mirror of princes. Rather the blind spot is placed
all too visibly before our eyes, taking the form of the
back of the head of the viewer composing the scene
before him as landscape. With this inversion, Romantic
art draws attention to the constitutive role of the subject
in transforming phenomenal reality into an object for
contemplation and representation. And in
Romanticism's exposure of the classical episteme, it is
the pure availability not of the subject but rather of the
object, that suffers, the object both as referent and
representation. For the subject gazing at the landscape
46 Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994
simultaneously blocks the viewer's access to the focal
point of the scene. The price of revealing the crucial
role of the subject in constituting the object of
representation is to dismantle the classical availability
of representation in unhindered form.
In surrealist aesthetics, the very notion of art as a
relation between object and subject comes under attack.
Surrealism pursues an art of practice, dissolving objects
into the processes which produce them. "Profane
illumination," Benjamin also terms surrealist aesthetic
practice, "a materialist, anthropological inspiration, to
which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an
introductory lesson."12 In part, Benjamin dwells on the
surrealist interest in drugs because intoxication too is a
practice rather than an object. ButBenjamin in particular
privileges this practice because it overcomes the
alienation of the senses. Indeed Benjamin's own interest
in drug-taking must be understood in this light, as more
than the prurient interest of a son of the bourgeoisie in
transgression. In Benjamin's writings underthe influence
of drugs such as Hashish in Marseilles, he finds drugs
to produce a sensuous intercourse with the cosmos
merging subject with surrounding world in rich and
complex ways.
Benjamin's description of the surrealist use of
language, too, focuses on its challenge to modernity's
severing of the subject from surrounding world. In
surrealism, Benjamin writes, "image and language take
precedence...Not only before meaning. Also before the
self."13 In traditional aesthetic practice, a writer's use of
image (rhetoric) and language are conceptualized as
style, the aesthetic index of his creative power. For
surrealism, in contrast, image and language are the
work of chance, they are, as surrealism puts it, lucky
finds. They are thus not the product of a creative subject
but rather result from the mysterious forces of a collective
unconscious, a concept collapsing the distinction
between individual and surrounding world. Andre
Breton writes of the surrealist fondness for chance
experiences of all sorts, "Chance is the form of
manifestation of exterior necessity which traces [se
fraie] its path in the human unconscious."14 With such
a collectivized view of the unconscious, dream, too,
becomes for surrealism a practice challenging the
autonomy of the subject. Benjamin writes, "in the
world's structure, dream loosens individuality like a
bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication
Visual Anthropology Review
[Rausch] is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful
living experience that allowed these people to step
outside the domain of intoxication."15 In allying surrealist
dream practice with intoxication [Rausch], Benjamin
qualifies it with the same word that One-Way Street
employed to describe the ancient experience of the
cosmos.
Benjamin's understanding of surrealism as seeking
to overcome the degradation of experience in modernity
is born out by surrealist practices that he does not
discuss. Notably, it resonates with aspects of the
movement of particular appeal to theoreticians of
postmodernity. Both Martin Jay and Rosalind Krauss
have insightfully isolated the complex ways in which
surrealism attacks what Jay calls modernity's
ocularcentrism.16 And vision is, as we have seen
Benjamin suggest, a sense crucial to modernity's
splitting of subject from surrounding world. Surrealist
challenges to the hegemony of the visual include an
interest in "visual paradoxes or puns,"17 efforts to make
the visual tactile ("experiments in producing arresting
visual effects by techniques such as collage, frottage,
decalcomania,fumage, coulage, and etrecissements"™)
an indexical use of photography and an interest in
montage and spacing. Benjamin's understanding of
surrealism as seeking "experience" also helps explain
why the visual dimension is nonetheless so important in
surrealist works. The surrealists do not seek to do away
with the visual but rather to reintegrate it with the other
senses, notably the sense of touch.
The surrealist treatment of the body also confirms
Benjamin's account.19 Surrealist representations of the
body attack the contemplative distance between the
subject and the art object, as surrealism attempts to
collapse the art object into the body of the subject him/
herself. In surrealism, the body has, moreover, been
exploded as support for the masterful gaze. The body
instead emerges as a field of resistant materiality
traversed and disrupted by impulses and drives. Another
aspect of surrealism squaring with Benjamin's account
is the movement's affinity with ethnography. As
Artaud's writings on the Tarahumara Indians illustrate,
the movement's interest in "primitive" cultures is not
only a negative refusal of Western modernity but also
an effort to reintroduce "experience" into this modernity,
in particular to overcome the modern alienation of the
senses.
Visual Anthropology Review
While Benjamin articulates his notion of art as
profane illumination in discussing surrealism, his other
writings extend this characterization beyond surrealism
to the avant-garde more generally. For the purposes of
the current essay, I give only one familiar example. In
Benjamin' s own manifesto for an avant-garde aesthetic,
he proposes a notion of film as working to overcome the
division of subject from external world. Singling out
Dada as challenging modern ocularcentrism and along
with it merging subject viewing and object viewed, he
speculates on how Dada art may provide a paradigm for
the socially transformative power of film. "From an
alluring appearance...the work of art of the Dadas
became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator
like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile
quality.. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting
element of which is also primarily tactile, being based
on changes of place and focus which periodically assail
the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film
unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting
invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the
spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before
the movie frame he cannot do so...This constitutes the
shock effect of the film."20
Benjamin's notion of avant-garde art as profane
illumination, I am suggesting, provides an acute way to
understand a crucial impetus stimulating the historical
avant-garde. It also helps to clarify the elective affinity
of this avant-garde for a certain strand of marxist
thought. There is a philosophical lineage in Western
marxism that has conceptualized the abolition of the
subject's alienation from the cosmos as fundamental to
transforming the social world. This lineage is
exemplified by Lukacs' Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat, an essay with great
importance for Benjamin's own articulation of degraded
modernity (Benjamin's credits the essay with catalyzing
his turn to marxist theory when he first read it while
vacationing on Capri in 1924 in the company of Ernst
Bloch and Asja Lacis). But marxi st philosophy' s affinity
with the avant-garde gesture reaches back into the
nineteenth century to the foundations of marxist thought.
The seeds of the marxist critique so important to Lucacs
are already found in Marx s earliest musings, as Marx
starts to translate Hegel's thinking in the Phenomenology
to the social realm.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,
Marx grounds the problems with modern Hfe in the
Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994 47
 alienation of subject from object dimension. Casting
this alienation in economic terms. Marx presages his
later notion of commodin fetishism. He suggests that
by its very nature the activity of production leads the
subject to experience his/her labor as congealed in alien
objetv Marx. too. sees this alienation to have a negative
effect on the senses, although Marx conceptualizes this
negative effect in a somewhat different way from Lukaes
and Benjamin. For Marx."private property- is., .product
result and necessary consequence of externalized labor,
of the external relation of the worker to nature and to
himself.21 And private property produces a reduction in
the complexity of sense experience. Rather than "man
appropriating to himself his manifold essence in an all-
sided way." including "every one of his human relations
to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling,
thinking, perceiving, sensing, wishing, acting, loving.**
"private property has made us so stupid and one-sided
that an object is ours only if we have i t if it exists for us
as a capital or is immediately possessed by us."-
"Hence all the physical and spiritual senses have been
replaced by the simple alienation of them all. the sense
of ha'ving.**23
"The overcoming of private property means
therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses
and aptitudes [Eigenschafien]."' Marx projects, giving a
substantial aesthetic component to life in his imagined
new world. In this emancipation, the subject becomes
reinfused in the alienated object dimension and vice-
versa, a process Marx designates with the term "human"
"it means this emancipation precisely because these
senses and aptitudes have become human both
subjectively and objectively "24 "The senses have
therefore become Theoreticians immediate]) in their
praxis*'* Marx comments of the world where the
alienation of subject from object dimension has been
overcome.25 Beautifully suggestive, this speculation
flows from Marx s observation that the divide between
abstract theory and concrete practice, too. is a
consequence of the alienation inhering in the acti\ity of
production. With the erasure of the subject from the
objects of his/her creation, the subject loses satisfying
access to the concrete and is condemned to abstraction.
a point Lukaes reification essay develops in great detail.
But aesthetic production does not only have to sit
on the sidelines waiting for the overcoming of private
property Marx *s reflections pave the wa\ for aesthetic
activity to participate in restoring the human dimension
Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994
to alienated life. Marx is so interested in private property
in part because it constitutes the sensuous expression of
an ontological state: "material immediately perceptible
private property is the material, sensuous expression of
alienated human life."2* If sensuous matter provides a
privileged access to troubled subjectivity, it provides a
starting point for transforming ontological relations.
"Socialism." Marx remarks, "begins with the sensuous
perception, theoretically and practically, of man and
nature. " r
Marx worked on his Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts in Paris, "the old high school of philosophy.
absit omen! and the new capital of the new world."28
Twenty years earlier, this Paris had coined a notion of
the social mission of an that was to have a long and
celebrated career. "It is we. the artists, who will be your
avant-garde." wrote Olinde Rodrigues of the social
mission of the artist in an early text of the Saint-
Simonian movement so important to Marx.29 "The
power of the arts is in fact the most immediate and the
fastest."30
NOTES
1.1 use modernity following the Frankfurt School, to
designate the Enlightenment world of science,
rationality, technology, and capitalism. As Adomoand
Horkheimer' s Dialectic of Enlightenment exemplifies,
however, the actual historical boundaries of this world
are slippery. Is its advent signaled by Odysseus, by
Bacon, by the invention of the spinning jenny, etc.? A
thoroughgoing critique of the term is. however, beyond
the scope of the current essay.
2. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire."
in Illuminations, trans. Ham 7 Zohn. New York:
Schocken Books. 1969. 156.
3. Walter Benjamin. "Surrealism—The Last Snapshot
of the European Intelligentsia." in Reflections, trans.
Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978. 179.
4. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. trans.
Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. 1984.24.
5. I develop this point at more length in Profane
Illumination, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993.
Visual Anthropology Review
6. Walter Benjamin, One- Way Street in One- Way Street
and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left Books, 1979,103.
7 Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, 103.
8 Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 157
9- Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 194.
10 Charles Baudelaire, "Correspondences," quoted by
Benjamin in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 181-
182.
11 .Michel Foucault, The Order of Things New York:
Random House, 1970, 16.
12. Benjamin, Surrealism, 179.
13* Benjamin, Surrealism, 179.
14. Andre Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. 23.
15. Benjamin, Surrealism, 179.
16. See Martin Jan, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley
University of California Press, 1993). For a full
discussion of surrealism's critique of ocularcentrism,
see the chapter on surrealism in L Amour fou:
Photography and Surrealism. New York: Abbeville
Press, 1985.
17. Jay, 245.
18. Jay, 247.
Visual Anthropology Review
19. On this issue, see Jay and Krauss as well as Hal
Foster's Compulsive Beauty.
20 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," in Illuminations, 238.
21 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
(1844) in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy
andSociety, trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat.
New York: Anchor Books, 1967. 297-298.
22. Marx, 308.
23 Marx, 308.
24. Marx, 308.
25. Marx, 308.
26. Marx, 304.
27 Marx, 314. "as essential beings," Marx continues.
28. Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, Kreuznach,
September 1843, in Writings of the Young Marx on
Philosophy and Society, 211.
29 Olines Rodrigues, "L'Ariste, le savant et
1'industriel," in Oevres de Saint Simon Paris: E. Dentu,
1875, X, 210. The text was written in 1825, although the
Saint Simonian movement only became widely known
in the first days of the July Monarchy.
30. Rodrigues, X. 210.
Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994 49