"PREFACE

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was still in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art."

COMMENTS:

The preface to Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, setting the inquiry within a Marxist framework, was dropped from the first published version, which appeared in French in 1936 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Other references to Marxism were also eliminated from this version, as were all topical political allusions and sentences that disclosed politically partisan positions. Max Horkheimer, editor of the journal in which the article was to appear, insisted on cutting lines that betrayed political allegiance or used a "politically topical formulation". He recommended introduction of less tendentious terminology: references to fascism are substituted by reference to totalitarian states, all allusions to communism are converted into the endorsement of "constructive forces of humanity", imperialist warfare becomes modern warfare or modern war, the phrase "against the present social order" is replaced by "for a true human order". In essence, the politics of the essay are fudged, and Benjamin's desire to dialogue specifically with Communist Party activists outlawed. Steamrollered by the vocabularies of American liberal progressivism and popular frontist class collaborationism, explicit revolutionary language is expurgated. Given that the theses, fashioned "as a weapon", aspired to be "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art" and represented a catalogue of political analyses with "informational value for the French avant-garde", Benjamin complained that the omissions rendered his text incomprehensible. Translation, it would seem, may be the occasion for re-interpretation and rewriting in more or less manifest ways.

Having registered Benjamin's pains to stipulate the politics of the essay, it is somewhat ironic to note that in 1992 a misprint appeared in several thousand copies of Fontana's re-issue of Zohn's translation in Illuminations. The error reversed the meaning of the last sentence of the preface, turning it into: "The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art". Apparently, remarkably few readers alerted the publishers to the misprint.
[Esther Leslie]