THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION / WALTER BENJAMIN

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher, cultural critic and author. He was born into a wealthy Jewish family; his uncle was the child psychologist who developed the concept of IQ, his cousin another philosopher who studied with Husserl and Heidegger. 

He studied philosophy during which time he was first exposed to Zionism. Distancing himself from the political and nationalist aspects of it, he focused on a cultural Zionism, interested in Judaism, Jewish values and mysticism for the furthering of the European culture. 

He volunteered for service at the outbreak of WW1, but was rejected. Later he feigned illness to evade enlistment, and continued his studies and translations of Baudelaire’s work. He married in 1917, had a son in 1918. Throughout 

most of his life, he circled in and around distinguished communities of philosophy, theology, metaphysics, arts and politics. Their contradicting influences are present in his output. 

According to his lifelong friend H.Arendt, his attack on the academic figures regarding their sympathy for the aesthetics of fascism in his 1924 essay on Goethe, ended up taking away his chances to pursue an academic career. Also around this time his marriage started dissolving, and his father withdrew his financial support. He made ends meet with friends, as a critic and translator. 

Benjamin moved to Paris in 1933, writing the first version of this book in 1935. He was incarcerated in a prison camp in 1938 for three months. In 1940 he crossed the French border into Spain to further travel to the US. The word of deportation that reached his group (which later ended up being false) impelled him to take his own life. A cancer. 

In the essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin starts with the bold statement ‘In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again’. This is a materialistic view focusing on the end product, disregarding process. Yet, soon he mentions the ‘aura’ of a genuine work of art (related to its uniqueness) which for him, is reduced through reproduction. 

On further describing the ‘aura’, he points to its remoteness, unapproachability, cultic quality: ‘By its very nature, it remains remote no matter how near’. He says originally the works of art were done in the service of some ritual, magical at first, later religious. (There really is no way of knowing that, Szukalski for example thinks they were done for future generations as signposts, warnings, but moving on-) He says we can see this in the collector character as well, a fetishism, a desire to possess the work of art and its cultic power. 

With photography art fell into a crisis, and reacted with the theological ‘art for art’s sake’ theory. From a photographic plate, many prints can be made, and the original has no meaning.  When the criterion of uniqueness is taken away, art is stripped of its social function: ‘Rather than being underpinned by ritual, it came to be underpinned by politics’. Benjamin says even if art is no longer sacred, it is still expected to be supernatural despite the avalanche film and photography brought on to the scene. Film industry’s compensation of the shrivelling of aura has been through promoting the cult of stardom, ‘an artificial inflation of personality outside the studio’. 

The role of the audience has shifted from one of worshipper to tester/criticizer: The screen actor’s performance goes through the medium of the camera and the editor who both comment on, choose, and test the actor’s performance; the direct contact with the audience is severed, and the audience assumes the camera’s stance.

‘[In film] the camera-free aspect of reality is here at its most artificial, and the sight of what is actually going on has become the blue flower [of Romanticism] in the land of technology’. So we are mired deeper in illusion land, but I wonder if that isn’t another compensation for the ‘shrivelling of aura’? 

Technological reproduction itself has started to become art itself, and the hand is relieved of its artistic responsibilities. With technologies such as close-up and slow motion, we are able to perceive things beyond the capabilities of our eyes: ‘Only the camera can show us the optical unconscious, as it is only through psychoanalysis that we learn of the compulsive unconscious’. 

Casting, embossing, engraving, lithography were early forms of reproduction: ‘It has always been among art’s most important functions to generate a demand for whose full satisfaction the time has not yet come’. Therefore ‘periods of decadence spring in fact from art’s richest core of historical forces’. And with this he cites the Dadaists trying to create what film is able, through painting and literature- they put art at the center of a scandal, and the work of art became a ‘bullet’. Benjamin says we cannot contemplate the work of art with film, quoting Duhamel: ‘I can no longer think what I wish to think. The moving images have ousted my thoughts’. And that is the film’s shock (‘bullet’) effect. Masses seek distraction, whereas art calls for immersion. ‘The person who stands in contemplation before a work of art immerses himself in it. The distracted mass [absorbs] the work of art into itself’. Here he gives the example of architecture which he says is received by those distracted masses, yet by using those architectural constructs people get used to them, and this is an effect that cannot be gained by simple contemplation. So even the distracted can get used to things, and form habits. 

Film, with its shock effect and its aiding the distracted state, despite its diminishing of the cult value, offers something halfway close to how architecture is received. 

In the afterword Benjamin posits that fascism leads to the aestheticization of politics, and all efforts towards that end culminate only in war- which provides a goal for the masses. He sees the Futurists’ aestheticization of war the result of the ‘art for art’s sake’ theory. ‘[Humanity’s] alienation from itself allows its own destruction to be savored as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’; fascism pursues the aestheticization of politics, and communism replies with the politicization of art. 

There is no remedy to be found in this essay for the ills he mentions, and I think Benjamin is content enough to have seen through the enthusiasts embracing the technological advances, and to be commenting on how another political device art has been assimilated into. Art has also been further assimilated into being an economic device, as it is now a commodity- which circles back to being a political device. He also touches on the messages these new mediums carry, and there is less pessimism there. I roll my eyes every time I encounter ‘art is inseparable from politics’, and maintain that politics hopefully will find another toy to play with, and hopefully artists also will not so easily succumb to that assertion. James Bridle in Ways of Being comes to mind again, the author’s (possibly impossibly hopeful) assumption about AI- that since AI’s developments have been primarily led by capitalist companies, we think it can only have that kind of intelligence, but as there are many different forms of intelligence, their ‘politics’ are not the only way. 

The next essay is on Kafka, written on the tenth anniversary of his death. There isn’t any dominating theme tying the essay together, or anything directly linking to the first essay. So, snippets: There is the exploration of hope in Kafka’s works: Kafka’s assistant figures are the only ones who have managed to escape from their families, and for whom there is possibility of hope. ‘His assistants are like the incomplete creatures of the Indian sagas, the Gandharras, not belonging to any of the other groups of figures, but no strangers to them, either; the messengers toing and froing between them’. And from this he posits ‘even inadequate means, indeed childish means can bring salvation.’ This brought to mind the just-enough satisfaction of criteria in biology, as opposed to perfect satisfaction. And a non-commitment to either side or pole, but a wandering between them in a gray zone. Eliane Radigue says, ‘Always in life, when it comes to the important matters, things go well when you make a real decision.’ ‘A real decision’ doesn’t need to be committing to a pole, and the toing and froing of the assistants do not need to be indecision.

Benjamin says Kafka did not always avoid the temptations of mysticism (-similar to Benjamin himself): ‘We thus face a mystery we cannot grasp. And the very fact that it is a riddle gave us the right to preach it, to teach people that what matters is not freedom, not love, but the riddle, the secret, the mystery to which they must place themselves in thrall- unthinkingly, even in defiance of conscience’. 

The last essay is on Marcel Proust. ‘[Proust] is permeated by the truth that we all of us lack the time to live the real dramas of the existence assigned to us. That makes us age. Nothing else. The lines and wrinkles in our faces are the entries recording the great passions, the vices, the discoveries that presented themselves at our door- but we, the people of the house, were not at home’. 

And quoting Riviere on Proust: ‘Proust died of unworldliness and because he lacked the understanding to alter living conditions that had begun to crush him. He died because he did not know how to light a fire or how to open a window’- Benjamin adds: ‘And of his nervous asthma, of course’. 

‘The ‘one-of-a-kind’ value of the ‘genuine’ work of art has its underpinnings in the ritual in which it had its original, initial utility value.’ ‘Its being reproducible by technologicl means frees the work of art, for the first time in history, from its existence as a parasite upon ritual.’

‘However, the instant the criterion of genuineness in art production failed, the entire social function of art underwent an upheaval. Rather than being underpinned by ritual, it came to be underpinned by politics.’

‘[In] all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading-matter, seeing-matter and hearing-matter.’ Aldous Huxley

‘Filth is the vital element of officialdom.’ ‘She could not understand why there was this coming and going of parties at all. ‘To dirty the front steps’, an official had once answered her, probably in irritation, but to hear that had been most enlightening.’

‘It’s characteristic of this judicial system that a man is condemned not only when he’s innocent but also in ignorance.’ Franz Kafka

Author: Walter Benjamin
Translator: J. A. Underwood
Title: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Published: 2008, by the Penguin Group
First published: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: 1936, ‘Franz Kafka’: 1934, ‘Picturing Proust’: 1929, this translation: 2008
Pages: 111