Special Topics ~ Focus on: WALTER BENJAMIN
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
See also the regular entry on Benjamin
for more information.
All About
Walter Benjamin Like
McLuhan, Benjamin was positive about new technologies, emphasizing their
liberating, democratizing influences. This put him at odds with the
dominant elitist strain of modernism of the early 20th century. Like
Baudrillard (who does admit he owes a debt to him), Benjamin saw that
the new media of his day were fundamentally altering the relations
between signifying systems in society and reality, and were doing so by
a process of simulation.
Benjamin's work remains the bedrock for a cohort of cultural and
critical theorists, from Georges Bataille to Paul
Virilio.
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OF PAGE ^ In short, Benjamin's main arguments in "The Work of Art"
are:
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Prior to
the present century, most so-called "authentic" artworks -- whether they
be religious artifacts or one-off paintings produced by artists for
their patrons -- maintained their aura precisely because of their
inability to be mass-reproduced. Such a concept thus holds aura and
authenticity to be profoundly undemocratic, since the means of artistic
production remain in the control of the rich and powerful, who can then
use such art to maintain control over the masses. However, with the
advent of mechanical means of reproduction of art, particularly still
photography and film, the very foundations of this setup had been
radically altered. Now almost anyone could acquire the means to either
take photographs of a work of art, or at least buy a cheap photograph or
postcard or the work. Although cultural elites in the late 19th century
had attempted to preserve this aura, "the social advance of the masses
and the invention of media such as film, which depends upon distribution
to the masses, had led to the inevitable 'decay of the aura' in the 20th
century" (Lunn, p. 152).
Benjamin
distinguishes between manual and machine reproduction of art. "The whole
sphere of authenticity is outside technical -- and , of course, not only
technical -- reproducibility," he argues. "Confronted with its manual
reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original
preserved all its authority; not so vis ˆ vis technical reproduction"
(Benjamin, p. 220). He gives two main reasons for this. First, machine
reproduction is more independent of the original than manual
reproduction; second, "technical reproduction can put the copy of the
original into situations which would be out of reach for the original
itself" (id.). In other words, the new mass-produced copies are able to
engage with the wider world in ways impossible to the original or
one-off copies. Just how this is so will become clearer as we continue.
Benjamin sums up his idea of reproduction by saying that the technique
"detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making
many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique
existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or
listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object
reproduced." It is these processes that lead to the "tremendous
shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis
and renewal of mankind" (Benjamin, p. 221).
So in
Benjamin's construct, the organs of state and religious authority have
steadily lost the ability to control general access to such works of
art, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. This is
clearest in relation to the cinema, which destroyed the "auratic" traces
which had dominated art through it historical functions as a part of
"magic," religious worship, and ritual. (He thus appears to draw on
Weber's notion of the "inevitable Entzauberung," or "demagification," of
the modern world.) Benjamin's more optimistic take on this process sees
capitalism as stripping the idealistic and theological "halo" away from
these works of art (Lunn, p. 152). However, capitalism¹s influence on
art is not all constructive, as we shall see.
As for
"aura," Benjamin describes it as the work of art's uniqueness and the
"phenomena of distance, however close [an object] may be;" he uses the
examples of distant mountains and a tree's bough overhead the observer
-- both contain "aura" to the extent that they are images that are not,
and have not been, reproduced mechanically (Benjamin, p. 222-23). Here
Benjamin is more unsure about the positive versus the negative
consequences of this process. His writings suggest that the loss of aura
(as opposed to authenticity) is not necessarily a good thing; but,
although Benjamin wrote elsewhere that the loss of the auratic tradition
could cause "irreplaceable losses to human experience," in "The Work of
Art" he sees only positive results from "the disintegrating process"
(Lunn, p. 153). As Lunn further explains:
Benjamin
spends a lot of time writing about film, which he sees as a new technik
of art, and this is probably his best example of reversibility in the
artistic process, as well as the clearest elucidation of his ideas. The
very mechanism of film production is progressive and positive. As
already noted, cinema destroyed the "auratic" traces left on art by its
historical functions as a part of "magic," religious worship, and
ritual, as well as "the secular cult of beauty since the Renaissance."
Now, with the "final decay of its auratic spell as an object of cultic
reverence, art was a potential instrument in the emancipation of the
masses." In this context, Benjamin emphasizes the "positive value of the
less concentrated and more distracted state of mind with which the mass
audiences viewed cinema," compared with the more individualized
experience of paintings or novels. This reception also allows the mass
audience a form of "expertise" in film reception which would fuse
critical and receptive abilities (Lunn, p. 152-153).
Of course,
Benjamin, following in the Marxist tradition at least in this respect,
sees this process as profoundly historical in nature. "Emphasizing that
the historical meaning of art changes with the character of its
technical production, Benjamin suggested that the reproducibility of
photos, prints, and, most of all, film destroyed the sense of
uniqueness, unapproachability, authenticity, and rootedness in the
cultural tradition of 'auratic' art" (Lunn, p. 152).
All these
changes in the reception of the work of art herald the eclipse of
"distance" in the production and reception of art and its transformation
from an unapproachable and unique object of worship (facilitating
submission to authority, Benjamin implied) to an agent of collective
self-emancipation (Benjamin, pp. 234-241).
Benjamin
was also intensely aware of what he saw as the political attempts to
undermine mass emancipation in the age of mechanical reproduction. He
did this by shifting the focus of attention on aestheticism -- the
constant attempts by various groups to aestheticize politics -- from the
avant-gardes to the Nazis, "whose substitution of 'intoxicating' warfare
for concrete social changes beneficial to the masses represented a kind
of 'aesthteticizing of politics'" (Lunn, p. 20). This is the profoundly
political dimension of Benjamin's work in relation to reproducibility.
He is quite clear on this aspect: "All efforts to render politics
aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" (Benjamin, p. 241). In examining
the workings of the Fascists whose ideology he so despised, he drew the
conclusion that Fascism had embarked on the road to aestheticizing
politics -- and, therefore, war -- in order to supply the artistic
gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by
technology." Moreover, he ends his essay by stating that
Finally,
then, Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction as emancipatory for the
masses, but such an emancipation was being retarded by the same forces
of capitalism and commodification (and, of course, fascism) that were
largely responsible for the development of mechanical reproduction in
the first place. Such a scenario might, arguably, be historically
plausible, if a little utopian and contradictory. However, according to
Lunn, the vulnerabiltity of such a position "lay in his apparent
insistence that all these changes were not so much potential uses as
inherent implications" of the new media of mass production. "What
prevented their immediate realization, in [Benjamin's] view, was the
dialectic of productive modes and productive realizations in capitalist
society," causing contradictions that were most extreme in the Nazi
regime's "subversion of the emancipating implications both of technology
and modern collective society" (Lunn, p. 154). Again, this is all tied
into Benjamin's aestheticization of politics and war -- turning politics
into a wonderful, even beautiful, spectacle.
In all of
Benjamin's writings, it is difficult to focus on a single theme of group
of themes that pervade them all, unless one focuses on the ideas of
reproduction and the centrality of the text. These are the themes which
stand out in his writings on translation, in his analysis of
Baudelaire's poetry, in the study of cultural transmission in the
Arcades project, and so on (Lechte, p. 205). What "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" does is to take his ideas of
culture, reproduction, and commodity fetishism and apply them to the
mass media in contemporary capitalist society. In that context, much of
what he wrote in the 1930s has retained a resonance and significance to
this day -- a significance that has only recently been recognized in the
United States.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," in ed. Hannah Arendt, Illuminations (Glasgow: Fontana,
1973).
Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to
Postmodernity (London; New York: Routledge).
Lunn, Eugene. Marxism and Modernism (Berkeley: U of California Press,
1984).
Wells, Liz. "Thinking About Photography," in Photography: A Critical
Introduction, ed. Liz Wells (London; New York: Routledge, 1997).
(Pronounced
"BIN-YA-MIN")
Benjamin, a German Jew and close associate of the Frankfurt
School in interwar Germany, was a contemporary of such
prominent Frankfurt School luminaries as Theodor
Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, and Georg
Lukacs; yet his work is now probably more widely known, certainly in
Anglo-American circles, than that of his one-time colleagues. Indeed,
something of a cult has grown around this man whose reputation soared
more than a generation after he committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish
border in September 1940, believing himself to be near capture by the
Gestapo. As recently as the 1960s, a cultural and media theorist as
notable as Marshall
McLuhan could argue seriously that he had never heard of Benjamin or
his work (even though much of McLuhan's own writings appear to draw
heavily on concepts first advanced by Benjamin). Such an assertion by
any serious cultural theorist would be unthinkable today. Benjamin's
ideas have, in recent years, been recognized as central precursors to late
modernism and postmodernism,
and the work of more recent thinkers such as Jean
Baudrillard. Why? Well, in a nutshell, Benjamin was one of the first
to think about how technological reproduction alters the way we look at
"reality," whatever that is.
"The Work of
Art" -- And Why It's a Big Deal
Benjamin is most famously
the author of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" (now published in English as a chapter in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt), which concentrated upon
defining the 'aura' of traditional art before the 20th century, and
analyzed the decay of this aura under the impact of new
media and new cultural technologies (Lunn, p. 151). Here Benjamin
argues that because of mechanical mass reproduction, art has lost its
"authenticity" in the capitalist-oriented culture industry of the
20th century. He writes of a shift in attitudes to art as a result of
the introduction of mechanical means of reproduction.
"Formerly
unique objects, located in a particular space, lost their singularity as
they became accessible to many people in diverse places. Lost too was the 'aura' that was attached to a work of
Art which was now open to many different readings and interpretations"
(Wells, p. 25). Thus far, he was pretty much in line with most of his
Frankfurt School colleagues. But, Benjamin argues, this
loss of authenticity is good, because it democratizes and politicizes
art. In this he disagreed with colleagues (and friends) such
as Adorno, since he is arguing that art's loss of authenticity might
actually help free people, not enslave them in a capitalist culture
industry. However, each stage of reproduction of an original work of art
also contributes to its loss of aura. (Aura and authenticity are
concepts that are closely bound up with each other, but more on this
below).
More for those die-hard Benjamin fans out there:
It's important to
evaluate just what Benjamin means when he talks about originality, and
loss of aura and authenticity, since many readers might think that these
terms (and concepts) carry mostly negative connotations. Do they? Well,
not really, at least according to Benjamin in this essay. He seems happy
to equate authenticity with authority -- the authority of oppressive
institutions such as the church or the state -- and history. As Benjamin
himself puts it, the work of art's authenticity is "the essence of all
that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive
duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced" (p.
221).
the social basis of the decay of aura was, in [Benjamin's]
view, the "sense of the universal equality of things" which imbued the
contemporary masses. Montage and radical juxtapositions -- in both
technically reproducible art and the work of dadaists and surrealists
-- were historically conditioned by the masses' attempt to overcome
spatial, temporal, and social distances, such as those between high
and low (economically and culturally) past and present, there and here
(p. 152; see also Benjamin, p. 223).
So, beyond the
concepts of aura and authenticity, just what is the process by which the
work of art's role in society has been fundamentally altered in the 20th
century? Well, here's where Benjamin's concepts of reproduction and
reversibility come to the fore. Benjamin's idea was that once the work
of art's aura of authenticity has withered away because of its ability
to be reproducible, the process of reproduction brings art objects
closer to a mass audience. However -- and this is important, too -- his
process also leads to the work of art (or the process of artistic
creation, since the one essentially becomes conflated with the other at
this point) being designed for reproducibility. As Benjamin describes
it,
for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction
emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
. . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any
number of prints; to ask for an 'authentic' print makes no sense. But
the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to
artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of
being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice --
politics (p. 224).
The political
dimension is something we will return to below; for the moment, however,
it is Benjamin's articulation of the effects of reproduction that caught
the imagination of other critical thinkers. For Lechte, for example,
it is the process of reproduction as such which is
revolutionary: the fact, for instance, that the photographic negative
enables a veritable multiplication of 'originals'. With the
photograph, therefore, the spectre of the simulacrum emerges, although
Benjamin never names it as such. The photograph as simulacrum
by-passes the simple difference between original and copy (p. 204).
Benjamin focuses on the concept of technik, which connotes
technology, for his elucidation of originality and reproduction. Two
elements stand out: "The first is that with the possibility of
reproduction a work of art can receive meaning from a diversity of
different contexts" (Lechte, p. 204). He draws attention to the work of
Gregory Ulmer, who talks of the art work, or signifier, being
"remotivated" in a new context, thereby forming the basis for late
modern/postmodern ideas of collage and montage (and, presumably,
sampling in music).
Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation
for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has
reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an
aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of
politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by
politicizing art (Benjamin, p. 241).
Here Benjamin is
developing his notion of "the cult of death in modern capitalist
culture" of the West (within which he included both democratic and
fascist states) by drawing attention to fascism's aestheticized
intoxication with technological warfare and its nostalgia for World War
I (Lunn, p. 222), even while apologizing from the horrors of Stalinism
and the stultifying regularity of Socialist Realist art. This is a
position which would later be joined by Adorno and Horkheimer in works
such as Dialectic of Enlightenment. (But this is to stray perhaps too
far from the purpose of this paper, which is to examine Benjamin¹s
thinking on the position of mechanical reproduction in society.)
Works Cited
Last Updated: feb. 26, 2001