(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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reshape the way in which we perceive the real in the first place, relate different
modalities of perception to each other, and thus situate our bodies
in the world. It is against the background of this emphasis on the historical
contingencies of the human senses that Benjamin in the second half
of his artwork essay comes to speculate about the psychophysical impact
of cinema on the spectator: how cinema, rather than merely stimulating
fantasy, subjects the viewer to a fundamental retraining of the senses. Cinema,
for Benjamin, extends the perceptual challenges of both the urban
environment (the overwhelming simultaneity of discontinuous visual
shocks in the myriad sights in the overcrowded streets of the modern city)
and of Dadaist artistic practice (the deliberate assault on the viewer by
aesthetically shocking readymades such as Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or
the politically satiric photo-montage of John Heartfield) to the realm of
modern entertainment and diversion. Because of the constitutive structure
of the cut, film can hit the spectator like a bullet. Film thus assumes
tactile qualities: it communicates to and defines the eye as a physiological
entity and as a bodily organ, not simply as a seemingly transparent
window of abstract sight. Film literally touches upon the viewer’s perception
because of its ballistic qualities; it is far too complex a medium to be
understood in terms of pure opticality, and it recasts sight into a medium
we cannot reduce to treasured assumptions of disembodied seeing.
Benjamin’s interest in the physiology of cinema spectatorship, in
tactile seeing, clearly has some roots in his early writing — in his recurrent
preoccupation with the relationship of mind and body, with sensuous
forms of experience, and with the magic of non-sensuous similarities.
Unfortunately, this is not the place to trace in further detail how Benjamin’s
work of the 1930s recalls and reframes his own earlier research
and writing on mimetic experience, empirical psychology, and the metaphysics
of perception, nor to engage in a more general discussion about
the intricate relationships of Benjamin’s thought of the 1920s and 1930s.
Suffice it to say, however, that Benjamin, in the context of his artwork
essay, hoped nothing less than to move beyond the speculative and universalizing
gestures of his early work and define the material conditions
and historical contingencies that make particular modes of perception
and embodiment possible in the first place. What is of greater interest
for my argument here is instead how Benjamin’s concept of embodied
spectatorship can certainly also be understood as a precursor of the ideas
of contemporary critics who seek to bring the body back to the realm
of media theory and criticism. Often simply reduced to a theorist of the
visual turn of modernity, Benjamin was very aware that the modern media
of image production did not appeal to the eye alone and permitted the
modern viewing subject to experience seeing in all its bodily complexity
and embeddedness. And yet once again it would be a mistake to consider
Benjamin’s notion of tactile seeing as directly compatible with the