• 1 In order to facilitate the browsing hypertext, we added into brackets intertitles that correspond t (...)

1Benjamin's concept of technique describes a practical relation to the world, implying special ontological, historical, political and aesthetic dimensions, across which Benjamin differentiates between a “first” (at first sight “traditional”) and a “second” technique (at first sight “modern”), for which the measure is instrumental and non-instrumental use.

• 2 In order fo facilitate the location of Benjamin's citations quoted in this article, we have referre (...)
• 3 Translation modified by author. German original: "Die Ordnung des Profanen hat sich aufzurichten an (...)

5 Benjamin's earliest, explicit reflections on technique are situated in the context of his large project on politics on which he worked on between 1918 and 1921/22. Technique here figures as one of the central concepts in Benjamin's political theory, alongside his metaphysics of a collective body (Leib) as political subject and his notion of the Messianic, distinguishing the political from religion, law and morals. True politics, for Benjamin, is limited to the order of the profane, and not directed towards a redemptive identity of worldly history and divine kingdom. Furthermore, as he writes in the Theological-Political Fragment from 1920/21, the "order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness" (SW 32, 305).³ Politics has no end outside itself but exclusively concentrates itself on the organization of worldly happiness. The political subject of this profane striving is humanity as a collective which organizes itself in a collective body. In history this collective body transforms and extends itself through the inclusion of nature through technique. Benjamin describes this nexus of politics, happiness, collective body and technique in his Schemata on the psycho-physical Problem:

• 5 See, Paul Scheerbart: Lesabéndio (GS II.2, 618-620); Sur Scheerbart (GS II.2, 630-2); Zu Scheerbart (...)
• 6 Translation of the author. German original: "Utopie des Leibes" (GS VI, 148).
• 7 Translation of the author. German original: "Pathos der Technik", "Pathos der Maschine" (GS VII.2, (...)
• 8 Translation of the author. German original: "Schöpfer von Maschinen und Erschaffer einer idealen Te (...)
• 9 Translation of the author. German original: "kein anderer Autor habe so den revolutionären Charakte (...)

7 Benjamin's early concept of technique is considerably inspired by Paul Scheerbart's novel Lesabéndio which he read around 1917/ 1918.⁵ As Benjamin was planning it, a comment on Lesabéndio would have been a fitting conclusion to his (unfinished) work on politics insofar as the novel conceives an idea of a productive, harmonious interplay between man and nature via technique. He calls the novel an "utopia of the collective body"⁶ which envisions the intermingling of mankind and nature in one body through technical artistic design. Even later in 1926/27, Benjamin emphasises the "pathos of technique", the "pathos of the machine"⁷ of Scheerbart's novels. His fictional characters are "makers of machines and creators of an ideal technique"⁸. For Benjamin "no other author had so clearly emphasized the revolutionary character of technological achievement"⁹ as Scheerbart did. He claims that man should abandon the idea that he is destined to master and exploit the forces of nature, and, instead, convince himself that technique has the potential to liberate him, together with nature.

• 10 German original: "allgemeine Versagen" (GS IV.1, 98)
• 11 See also Irving Wohlfarth (2002).
• 12 German original: "ein Versuch zu neuer, nie erhörter Vermählung mit den kosmischen Gewalten" (GS IV (...)
• 13 German original: "Dies große Werben um den Kosmos vollzog zum ersten Male sich in planetarischem Ma (...)
• 14 German original: "Weil aber die Profitgier der herrschenden Klasse an ihr ihren Willen zu büßen ged (...)

8Around 1924/25, Benjamin's early concept of technique takes a critical turn which insists more on the destructive powers of modern technology. One-Way Street is a critique of the reactionary and alienated lifestyle of the German bourgeoisie and the "general failure" (SW 1, 453)¹⁰ of Weimar Germany. In the last aphorism, entitled “To the Planetarium”, Benjamin draws a conceptual trajectory from ancient times to his own present and for the first time develops an anthropological materialist rather than metaphysical argument concerning technique.¹¹ In modernity, Benjamin argues, cosmic experience by which in antiquity man communicated with nature through intoxication and collective rituals is lost. But for Benjamin, it has by no means vanished irretrievably, more willingly it has transformed. And the first time it manifested itself in its new form is the First World War, "an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers"(SW 1, 486).¹² Benjamin goes on to argue that "this immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology"(SW 1, 486-7).¹³ With the development of modern technologies, transport systems, techniques of reproducibility, telecommunication technologies etc., cosmic experience transitioned into technique as its new medium. But "because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath"(SW 1, 487).¹⁴

• 15 Translation modified by author. German original: "Jeder kommende Krieg ist zugleich ein Sklavenaufs (...)
• 16 Translation modified by author. German original: "Und so auch Technik nicht Naturbeherrschung: Behe (...)
• 17 German original: "Mitbestimmungsrecht an der sozialen Ordnung", "harmonisches Zusammenspiel" (GS II (...)
• 18 Translation modified by author. German original: "daß die soziale Wirklichkeit nicht reif war, die (...)
• 19 See also Irving Wohlfarth (1998).

9This problem of a bad technique, one that takes revenge on mankind, Benjamin develops further in Theories of German Fascism. "Any future war will also be a slave revolt on the part of [technique] [...]"(SW 2, 312).¹⁵ According to Benjamin, technique demands a revolution of the social relations, because it aims at a fundamentally different relation between man and nature as that of domination and exploitation: "[Technique] [...] is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man"(SW 1, 487).¹⁶ But the capitalist relations of production prevent an emancipatory use of technique. And because its "right of determination in the social order" is denied, technique abdicates from a "harmonious interplay" (SW 2, 312).¹⁷ The emancipatory potential of technique turns into its very opposite. Every war, Benjamin argues, is always an evidence "that social reality was not ready to make [technique] [...] its own organ, and that [technique] [...] was not strong enough to master the elemental forces of society"(SW 2, 312).¹⁸ The missed chance of a revolution, of taking hold of technique’s potential, takes revenge… in war.¹⁹

• 20 See also Burkhardt Lindner (1992); Alexander Pivecka (1993).
• 21 German original: "Mit den verschiedenen Methoden technischer Reproduktion des Kunstwerks ist dessen (...)
• 22 German original: "Die gesellschaftlich entscheidende Funktion der heutigen Kunst ist Einübung in di (...)
• 23 Translation modified by author. German original: "Der Umgang mit dieser Apparatur belehrt ihn zugle (...)

10In The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin develops further this difference between a good and a bad use of technique’s potential into the anthropological materialist concept of a first and a second technique.²⁰ Moreover, he relates technique to the sphere of art and connects it to the notion of play. Technique as well as art, Benjamin argues, have the same origin in ritual. The earliest objects that stood in the service of magic can neither be called technique nor art but they both originate in religion. Only in the course of history they separated. As two different spheres they are both historically determined by a tension between two extremes; in art, this tension is build between a “cult value” and an “exhibition value”, respectively semblance and play; in technique, this tension deploys itself between a “first” and a “second technique”, i. e. the mastery of nature on the one hand, the interplay between man and nature on the other. It is by shifting from one pole to another that art correlates with technique. "The scope for exhibiting the work of art has increased so enormously with the various methods of technologically reproducing it that, as happened in prehistoric times, a quantitative shift between two poles of the artwork has led to a qualitative transformation in its nature" (SW 4, 257).²¹ In modernity, Benjamin seems to suggest, art is ahead of technique insofar as it has already enacted the qualitative shift from cult value to exhibition value, from the primacy of semblance to the primacy of play. That is, art has already done the qualitative leap that in the sphere of technique is bound to the transformation of the relations of production. Therefore, Benjamin claims that "the primary social function of art today is to rehearse that interplay" (SW 3, 107-8)²² between man and nature which second technique makes possible. This is precisely the political function of art. Art teaches man that technique will release him from his "enslavement to the powers of the apparatus only when humanity’s whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second [technique] […] has set free" (SW 3, 108).²³

• 24 German original: "die weltgeschichtliche Auseinandersetzung zwischen der ersten und zweiten

11Benjamin describes this as the "world historical conflict between first and second technique" (SW 3, 127).²⁴ The former makes

• 26 German original: "mit unbewußter List daran ging, Abstand von der Natur zu nehmen." (GS VII.1, 359)

12“First technique” is intrinsically related to mythical power relations, regardless whether it expresses the mastery of man by nature (in prehistory) or the mastery of nature by man (in modernity). The origin of “second technique” resides in play through which human beings "by an unconscious ruse, […] first began to distance themselves from nature" (SW 3, 107).²⁶

• 27 German original: "Er sieht sein Heil darin, die Massen zu ihrem Ausdruck (beileibe nicht zu ihrem R (...)
• 28 Translation of the author. German original: "hat viel Interesse daran, den Funktionscharakter der T (...)
• 29 Translation modified by author. German original: "Revolutionen sind Innervationen des Kollektivs: g (...)

13In modernity this "world-historical conflict between first and second technique" culminates in the most intense contradiction between the forces and the relations of production. By the mid 1930s, against the background of his experiences with fascism in Germany, his exile and the development in Russia, Benjamin saw only two ways in which the crisis could proceed: fascism or communism, war or revolution. This, famously, is the political framework of the Artwork-Essay. Fascism tries to organize the masses without changing the relations of property. "It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights" (SW 3, 121).²⁷ Consequently, fascism is also interested "in keeping secret the true functional character of technique".²⁸ Emancipatory revolutions, on the other hand, "are innervations of the collective – or, more precisely, efforts at innervation on the part of the new, historically unique collective which has its organs in the new [technique] [...]" (SW 3, 124).²⁹ Utopian demands, like the ones formulated by Fourier and Scheerbart, are for Benjamin prophetic expressions of the potential of a playful, experimental and constructive use of technique. Moreover, in the sphere of art, the collective can already in the present practice such a playful use. Art serves as a space for rehearsal in which the collective can experience how little it has realized his quest for happiness under the spell of the first technique and become familiar with the new “room for play” (Spielraum) opened up by the second technique. But only through a revolutionary transformation of the relations of production can the collective body make technique one of its organs and realize its potential in a playful interplay between mankind and nature.

• 30 Translation modified by author. German original: "einer Sprache der Technik, die nicht die Fachspra (...)
• 31 Translation modified by author. German original: "So prägte sie [die Technik], tief durchdrungen vo (...)

16 Therefore, I want to argue conclusively that Benjamin thought of technique as a non-instrumental medium which is structured like a language. Already in On Language as such and on the Language of Man, Benjamin speculates that there is "a language of [technique] [...] that is not the specialized language of technicians" (SW 1, 62).³⁰ Likewise, in his later writings, he alludes to the notion of technique as a language. In Theories of German Fascism, he argues that technique "gave shape to the apocalyptic face of nature and reduced nature to silence – even though this [technique] [...] had the power to give nature its voice" (SW 2, 319).³¹

• 32 German original: "er teile eine Sache anderen Menschen mit, denn das geschieht durch das Wort, durc (...)

17A central aspect of Benjamin’s early philosophy of language is the difference between immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit) and a means to an end. Language, for Benjamin, is never only a medium as a means to an end outside of itself. No language exhausts itself in being a medium for the transmission of information. Benjamin rejects any understanding of language declaring that "man is communicating factual subject matter to other men, for that does happen through the word by which he denotes a thing" (SW 1, 65).³² Language, in Benjamin's view, is not something through which but something in which something is communicated. But this intense communication isn’t directed towards something outside of language. It is directed towards that non-place in language where language as a finite, profane and historical being is non-all. Every act of such an intense communication in language is purposeful for the immediate relation of language to that a-topos where it doesn’t exist yet. Such communication corresponds over and over again to a fragmentary realization of an immediate relation to a universal language.

• 33 Translation modified by author. German original: "ihrer wirtschaftlichen Natur nach kann die bürger (...)
• 34 Translation modified by author. German original: "Und so auch Technik nicht Naturbeherrschung: Behe (...)

18Benjamin's rejection of any instrumental notion of language echoes in his critique of the instrumentalization of technique by capitalist bourgeois society. According to its economic nature, the latter "cannot help insulating everything [technical] [...] as much as possible from the so-called spiritual, and it cannot help resolutely excluding [technique's] [...] right of determination in the social order" (SW 2, 312).³³ Technique, here, is only ever a means to the purpose of exploitation and domination. In contrast to this Cartesian idea that man has the potential to be master and possessor of nature, for Benjamin, technique's purpose "is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man" (SW 1, 487).³⁴ If technique has, like Benjamin argues, the power to give nature a voice, then it is also the key for a different design of the world.

• 35 German original: "die an der Technik nicht einen Fetisch des Untergangs, sondern einen Schlüssel zu (...)

19 Technique is a non-instrumental medium structured like a language. It has the potential to function as a common language for mankind and nature alike. The non-instrumental use of technique can be described as an intense communication not directed towards an end outside of the world but towards the non-all of a universal language of the world. Making a non-instrumental use of technique means to freely use it in order to playfully and constructively give shape to world oriented towards the idea of happiness. Such happiness, again, is not a state, not an end, but that non-place in the world where what is in the world is not yet. Happiness as the a-topos of the world is at the same time the a-telos of technique. It constitutes humanity’s infinite task to which technique is the medium. Technique serves the intensive and fragmentary realization of happiness as the bodily intermingling of nature and man. Thus, for Benjamin, man possesses in technique "not a fetish of doom but a key to happiness" (SW 2, 321).³⁵