218 Part III: Emigration Years
Benjamin conceived of these arguments as a kind of pendant to
‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.^24 Adorno was far from
happy with the result. He had had an original German version and a
French translation of the essay on his desk ever since March 1936.
He responded in the same month with a long letter containing a funda-
mental critique. It was unacceptable to transfer the ‘magic aura’ to ‘the
autonomous work of art’ by way of definition. Instead, the autonomous
work of art compounds within itself the magical element with the ‘sign
of freedom’.^25 The element of freedom in art, however, consists ‘in
the pursuit of the technical laws of art’ from which its character as a
construct results. For Adorno, it was a failure of dialectical thinking
when Benjamin equated aura and autonomous art ‘to which it then
flatly assigned a counter-revolutionary function.’^26 Adorno had no time
for the assertion that the allegedly emancipatory effect of the film could
help the proletariat to become conscious of its position as a potential
historical subject and that this would prevent it from becoming
bourgeoisified – a process which in his view was long since complete.
‘The laughter of the cinema audience’, he told Benjamin, ‘is anything
but salutary and revolutionary; it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism.’^27
The idea that ‘a reactionary individual can be transformed into a
member of the avant-garde through an intimate acquaintance with the
films of Chaplin strikes me as simple romanticization.’^28 Even a film like
Modern Times was far from being an avant-garde film. On the contrary,
its effects were derived from the auratic illusion that is created by mass
culture in general. This reference to mass culture points to elements
of an argument that Adorno had developed with greater precision in
the essay on jazz that he wrote around the same time. In ten years’
time, these arguments would blossom into his fully fledged theory of
the culture industry.
At a number of points in his letter Adorno warned Benjamin to
beware of the dangers of falling too much under the influence of Bertolt
Brecht. He was worried both about Brecht’s interpretation of Marxism
and about the way in which Brecht insisted on the political nature of
drama. A dialectical conception of art and mass culture – ‘a dialectic
between the extremes’ – could be arrived at only ‘by the elimination of
Brechtian motifs’.^29 The way in which Benjamin tried to combine Marx’s
materialism with a philosophical messianism appeared fundamentally
suspect to Adorno. He classified Benjamin’s materialism as ‘anthropo-
logical’ and imputed to Benjamin the belief that ‘the human body
represents the measure of all concreteness’. Adorno felt ‘unable to
accept’ such an undialectical ontology of the body.^30
The correspondence between 1935 and 1936 testifies to the intensity
of the discussions between Adorno and Benjamin. They suggest that
the younger man was attempting to define himself against the older
one, and to discover his own independent position. This independence
was evidently fostered by his prolonged exploration of Husserl’s