Joasia Krysa & Geoff Cox

Where does socially engaged practice, participatory and educational arts activity stand within current debates around contemporary arts practice?

What conclusions might be drawn from a parallel between the contemporary practice of 'techno-art collectives' and Benjamin's statement (in 'The Author as Producer' of 1934) that it is simply not enough to have political commitment without at the same time thinking through its relationship to the means of production and the technical apparatus?

'An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his [/her] products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works.' (1983: 98)

The significance of 'The Author as Producer' essay lies in requiring the author to act as an active agent, to intervene in the production process, and property relations, to change 'technique' and transform the apparatus. This is the 'organising function' that Benjamin proposes demanding the author reflect upon the production process - setting the laboratory in opposition to the finished work of art.

The essay is centrally concerned with questions of social engagement. A progressive writer (artist or cultural producer) acknowledges the choice of in whose service, or more particularly class interests, the writing (artwork) operates. This, Benjamin explains, is usually called 'pursuing a tendency', or expressing 'commitment' and he takes this to be a key term (1983: 86) He explains that more often than not, commitment is seen in opposition to quality and suggests they might be synthesised to be one and the same - and sets out to prove it so using a dialectical method of argument. As a result, he argues that for a work to be 'politically correct', it must simultaneously be correct in the literary sense. The first principle he establishes is that the work is not autonomous in itself and must be inserted into the context of 'living social relations' themselves determined by production relations according to materialist criticism. Instead of making the usual opposition of whether a work is reactionary or revolutionary, he simply asks: what is its position within the production relations of its time - and this is a question of 'technique' for Benjamin.

Technique has a particular sense in German derived from 'Technik' (technology and skill in German) but serves the purpose here to collapse the false separation of form (or method) and content. It also allows for the synthesis of commitment and quality that Benjamin proposes. He cites the Russian writer Tretyakov who as an 'operative' writer typifies suitable technique and lies outside the established canon of literary forms as a journalist. This is the part of the argument for Benjamin who thinks that the category of literature should evolve according to the energy of the time and include new forms and confusions. He calls this the 'melting-down process' of established forms - the temperature of which is determined by class struggle. In this way new forms can be cast (evoking Marx's phrase 'all that is solid melts into air' perhaps). His example of this regenerative process is the newspaper, because it throws into question a number of established separations - of academic and popular modes, of descriptive and creative writing, but perhaps particularly the separation between writer and reader:

'For as literature gains in breadth what it loses in depth, so the distinction between author and public, which the bourgeois press maintains by artificial means, is beginning to disappear in the Soviet press. The reader is always prepared to become a writer, in the sense of being one who describes or prescribes. As an expert - not in any particular trade, perhaps, but anyway an expert on the subject of the job he happens to be in - s?he gains access to authorship. Work itself puts in a word. And writing about work makes up part of the skill necessary to perform it. Authority to write is no longer founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnical one, and so becomes common property.' (1983: 90)

This exists in potential for Benjamin as he recognises that property is crucial here. Along with this, he is keen to criticise the intelligentsia's attitude of mind as having little practical use: 'the important thing in politics is not private thinking but, as Brecht once put it, the art of thinking inside other people's heads' (1983:92). He further stresses the important distinction between theory and activism: that it is simply not enough to have political commitment however revolutionary it may seem, 'without at the same time being to think through in a really revolutionary way the question of their own work, its relationship to the means of production and its technique.' (1983: 91) This is what Benjamin defines as a producer: 'Technical progress is, for the author as producer, the basis of his [/her] political progress' (1983: 95). He continues that to be merely at the side of the proletariat is no place to be: 'the place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible place. What is required is 'functional transformation', Brecht's phrase to describe the 'transformation of forms and instruments of production' (1983: 93). In other words, a practice that not merely engages with the apparatus or is satisfied with finished works but one that seeks to transform the apparatus - and thus proposes technical innovation and revolutionary use-value over mere 'modishness' (by this he is thinking of photographers who depict poverty as spectacle - human misery as an object of consumption in his words, 1983: 96).

The problem of course, even then, is that technical innovation and social engagement happens all the time but without putting into serious question the ruling interests. Improvement of the production apparatus for Benjamin, necessarily means in terms of Socialism - the combination of commitment and quality in technique, so to speak. A further example of good technique in the essay is that of Dadaism, that sought to test art for its authenticity by ideas such as the 'readymade' and photomontage. He describes this as follows:
'You put a frame round the whole thing. And in this way you said to the public: look, your picture frame destroys time; the smallest authentic fragment of everyday life says more than a painting. Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it.' (1983: 94)

Benjamin further suggests that cultural production requires a pedagogic function. It must have the function of a model (1983: 98) turning consumers and readers alike into collaborators. His example is Brecht who uses the apparatus of epic theatre to reveal the 'functional relationship between stage and audience, text and production, producer and actor. Epic theatre, he declared, must not develop actions but represent conditions. As we shall see it obtains its 'conditions' by allowing the actions to be interrupted.' (1983:99 - and reminding us usefully of the title of the symposia series) The infamous Brechtian 'alienation' technique (with the emphasis on 'technnique' in this context) works against the illusion of theatre, allowing the audience to recognise real and present conditions. Thus the mediated (ideological) artifice is uncovered through a process of testing and observing through practice and dramatic actions the alienation of the audience - hopefully in a lasting manner. It is Brecht who exemplifies the opposition of 'the dramatic laboratory to the finished work of art' (1983: 100).

The essay recommends that the writer (artist, cultural producer) must reflect upon their position within the production process like a technician, demonstrating expertise alongside solidarity. This alliance is necessary to transform him [/her], 'from a supplier of the production apparatus, into an engineer who sees his task in adapting that apparatus' (1983: 102).

references:
All references to Walter Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer' in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, London: Verso 1983; written as a lecture for the Institute for the Study of Fascism, in Paris, April 1934. A more recent translation is available in Michael W. Jennings, ed, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al, Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University 1999, pp. 768-782.