On Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

- A lecture written to be accompanied by simultaneous silent screening of Vertov ’s ‘Man With a Movie Camera’.

Paul O’Kane October 2006

What should we do with the mass? What should we do with the mass?
The mass, now perhaps better known as the ‘Multitude’[1].

During the 1920s and 30s in which Walter Benjamin was writing, the mass were the great focus of Modernity. They (or perhaps we should say ‘we) appeared during the 18th and 19th century as a product of the urban-ising industrial revolution in the explosively expanding cities of every modern nation.

The mass, the city, and technology -these are the problems which Walter Benjamin brings to challenge Art and Aesthetics, i.e. to challenge Art’s objects, Art’s techniques, Art’s theories and values.

What has changed? What is Modern?
Benjamin traces certain values of art deep into its past. the essay ranges from prehistory to modernity. He discusses art’s rituals and cult and sacred values, its ‘magic’ values which only later become organised religious values, and then Aesthetic values, before encountering mechanical reproducibility.

Ancient arts of caves and ‘primitive’ rituals may be sacred, valued in that they are not meant to be seen or can only be seen by a priest or shaman or a small elite. They therefore have little or no ‘exhibition value’[2] only this distant cult-ish value, this value which arises from being held at a distance, unreachable, untouchable, beyond us.

If we say something cannot be touched or cannot be seen, it immediately attracts the value of an ‘aura’.

It, is secreted in a specific place, and It, is a unique object. this uniqueness is also its value -an aspect of its aura.

If we make a manual copy of a unique object, often -Benjamin suggests- it will be a forgery, a kind of crime against the original, a crime against authenticity. Art has invested enormous value in this authenticity.

In the essay Benjamin pursues a history of ways and means of reproduction, from Greek foundries and coins to arrive at Lithography, and then Photography.

Photography reproduces anything, including any work of art.[3] It reproduces mechanically and an endless number of times. There is no point -Benjamin says- in asking for an ‘original’ print from a photograph because they are endlessly repeatable.[4]

Photography therefore avoids or evades the established value of uniqueness and authenticity. When photography makes endless, cheap or easily available reproductions of a unique and authentic artwork, that artwork loses some of its cult or ritual value as something belonging only in one place and only visible to a few. Benjamin says that due to availability through mechanical reproduction the artwork’s ‘aura withers’.[5]

But now, the artwork becomes available to the mass. If it has lost aura and lost its unapproachable, unique place through being photographed, and if photography deprives an artwork of its ritual, cult-ish value, the photograph nevertheless introduces a new value -its political value., for now it is in the hands of the polis, the people, and capable of transforming their mass consciousness. It has lost aura but gained social significance.[6]

The question -Benjamin says- is not whether photography is art, but of how photography has completely transformed existing ideas of what art is.

Henceforth we can begin to make art precisely to be reproduced, precisely with the aim of being reproduced and being distributed en -masse while sensitive to and responsible not for aura but for art’s social significance.

In recorded music, in magazines and in cinema, art leaves the site of its production and enters into the homes, the pockets, and the daily lives of the mass.

Of all modern arts and of modern technologies it is Cinema, which, for Benjamin is most socially significant. The very fact that -as Benjamin cites- a movie needs an audience of 9 million to be financially viable shows that it is an artwork intrinsically made with the mass and reproduction in mind. It is not an art work with its own value of authenticity which is only subsequently reproduced.

Partly as a kind of Imperialism or cultural colonialism, partly to divert or ‘distract’ its own unemployed mass, 1930s Hollywood is making romances, dramas and musicals which carry with them Nationalistic and Ideological messages to Europe. Benjamin seems to see Charlie Chaplin appropriating this tendency, riding its wave and finding a way to use it to send Socialist messages immersed in comedy. [7]

Benjamin admires post-revolutionary Russian cinema which is perhaps more concerned with what he elsewhere[8] calls ‘standard evidence for historical occurrences’. i.e. the facts of daily lives, the ‘voice’ of work and workers, the mass as a series of flashing fragments as can be seen in Vertov’s ‘Man with a Movie Camera’.[9] This banality does not mean however that they are not valuable nor entertaining films, but their pleasure and political value does challenge traditional aesthetics.

By the time he speaks of Cinema, Benjamin has already cited the photographs of Atget who is said to have photographed the empty night streets of Paris as if they were ‘the scene of a crime’. But he wants to discuss the importance of this new value in Atget as something unlike the old ‘contemplative’ connoisseurial values of art.

Photographs like Atget’s -emptied even of some human face which may absorb us like a religious object- are as barren as photographs made by a police investigation. They do not absorb our contemplation, rather they fire questions at us. They have no cult-ish, ritual aura but transmit a new political significance for modernity, a question for modernity?[10]

When a film is made, it is the result of a series of tests; tests of the actor, of the set and of the props. The film is not made in the presence of the actor but elsewhere, in the cutting room where some tests succeed and others are discarded.

The theatre actor may maintain his or her own ritual or cult value as aura. The audience comes to be in the unique place of the theatre, as a chosen few, to see the curtain rise on the real, unique and authentic presence of the stage actor. [11] [12]

The cinema actor enjoys none of this but is made or broken by the camera and the machinery of editing, and also by an audience who also see precisely from the camera’s point of view, placed in the role of a machine, and who also therefore test and criticise.

To compensate for ‘withered’ aura, the film studio can boost cinema actor with an accompanying deluge of publicity with which to boost the actor’s status into ‘stardom’. Similarly, an artwork which has lost the aura of its uniqueness to photographic reproduction may nevertheless become famous, a kind of ‘star’ as a result of publicity. But this is always a different value to the value of a unique authenticity, a unique and inaccessible presence in a particular place.

From the very outset of Benjamin’s essay he is discussing politics. He begins with Marx and ends with a comparison of Fascism and Communism. so, how does he weave all of this complex, sometimes even rambling material together? and does the essay have any central point or line of thought?

What should we do with the mass? After World War One, a Germany economically ruined and populated with millions of widows and amputees, first undergoes, in 1919, a botched and repressed revolution which, instead of emulating Russia’s experiment of a Communist state, becomes a bourgeois republic, a compromise.

This republic contains chaotic forces of poverty, resentment, disillusionment, Communists, Fascists and antagonism. The feel of it is described in paintings by George Grosz and Otto Dix. An corruption and black markets thrive amid rife gangsterism and prostitution, as well as a libertine, decadent night-life of jazz, drink and dance.

Of all the artists and forces around him, Benjamin hesitates before becoming a dogmatic party communist (though he visits to see for himself in the 20s and documents the trip wonderfully in his memoir Moscow.)[13], he criticises Futurism as Fascist, he admires and is influenced by Surrealism[14], but in this essay he reveals his strong support for Dada.

Dadaists, and artists associated with Dada, like Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield, Hugo Ball, and Tristan Tzara, impress Benjamin because they too have rejected the old, ritual and cult-ic values of art’s aesthetics (indeed Dada is ‘anti-art’ and ‘anti-aesthetic’), they have rejected the desire to produce objects of contemplation and instead hit the audience ‘like a bullet’ with their cut-up collisions and chaotic collages. Benjamin says: ‘The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion.’

Like the Russian film makers that Benjamin admires, the Dadaists enter directly, physically into the material of Modernity and its products, slicing the magazines which proliferate in Berlin and making of them howling complaints as to the disturbing experience of Modernity, -particularly of Germany’s post-war economic crisis, and even more vehemently against the rising forces of big business, arms manufacturers, statistics, and of course Fascism.

The fascists have -as Benjamin says, ‘aestheticised politics’ and they stage enormous rallies in their narcissistic uniforms, taking hold of the mass and all its bewildered resentment and hopelessness, to channel it into a hatred which is only expressible through yet another war.

The mass can revolt and simply be beaten down with state violence, Fascism gives the mass ‘expression’ and identity as a thing, a ‘one’ a ‘nation’, but only by opposing the mass to others in hatred. Alternatively, the mass can apply its energies constructively and internally by changing existing property relations in a communist distribution of wealth. The mass can also be driven into theatres, there to be distracted and indoctrinated. Fascism, by refusing any change to existing property relations channels the mass and the surplus of Capitalism into war.

Leni Riefenstahl’s film ‘Triumph of the Will’ demonstrates the aestheticisation of the mass themselves who begin to narcissistically admire themselves as a mass even as they are forced to kneel before the Fuhrer cult. For Benjamin, Dadaism and Communism provide an alternative, rather than aestheticise politics -which is what Fascism does- Dad and Communism politicise art...

Cinema, photography, and Dada, are then the arts that Benjamin champions as examples of means by which art in modernity might avoid lapsing into the quasi-theological impotence of an ‘art for art’s sake (yet another form of narcissism). Via Cinema, photography and Dada, art might instead place itself in the service of revolution. Photography -Benjamin says- is ‘the first revolutionary art’, and if the mass may now see themselves, it should not be as a uniform speck in an artfully staged rally but in all its chaotic uncertain complexity, constantly testing itself, turning to face itself, not as an admirer luxuriating in its own unique value, but as a harsh and constructive critic.

The authenticity which dies with photography is symbolic of the authenticity of race and blood and nation preached by fascism, and of all Kings and leaders. It is replaced by a mass value of ‘universal equality’ without traceable origins.[15]

Benjamin’s essay is typical of his unorthodox approach in that it jumps, cuts and rambles, slows, rushes, and zooms-in, mixing art history and theory with unique insight into his immediate surroundings, all with the purpose of producing an urgent political appeal.

The essay’s urgent inventions mean that it is not his most charming writing. This appears in his more Proust-influenced memoirs of childhood and descriptions of modern cities, where nevertheless, a collage-like fragmentation persists.

Benjamin failed as an academic because of his idiosyncratic, lyrical approach to writing. He died in 1940 aged 48 as an exile from Fascism, having fled to Paris, then en route to America via Spain he committed suicide, apparently in despair at being refused entry at a Spanish border crossing and in fear of falling into the hands of the Gestapo.

Despite his large body of fragmentary and unfinished works, Walter Benjamin has become one of the most revered and influential voices of the early 20th century, of its modernity, its politics and its arts. Despite his modesty, gentlemanly manner and relative obscurity during his lifetime, and his untimely death, he maintains stature as an enormous influence on all writing and thinking of Modernity and of our attempts to come to terms with our own times.

END 2,000 words

© 2006 Paul O'Kane

[1] Reference to the works of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt

[2] One of Benjamin’s loose appropriations of Marx’s terms in Capital (which it is said he didn’t read until c.1930.)

[3] See Malraux and the concept of ‘The Museum Without Walls’ as a metaphor of photography.

[4] This gives on to the theory of Simulacra ‘a copy without an original’ available though the works of Baudrillard but traceable to classical thought. A concept with ‘diabolical’ and ‘unnatural’ resonance.

[5] The word ‘withers’ is also a second reference to the ‘branch of a tree’ which Benjamin (somewhat arcanely) utilises when attempting to define his notion of aura.

[6] Here, the unique and original symbolises the King, or Fuhrer, the purity of race or totality of a fatherland -all ideals sent down from an elite to maintain a mass in awe. whereas the humble and ubiquitous ‘copy without an original’ symbolises the empirical experience of the mass who can place little value in their own lineage, inheritance and origin, but are instead daily faced with the task of intuitive survival.

[7] However, Benjamin is perhaps more critical of Chaplin as working in the service of Capitalism in an essay specifically devoted to him.

[8] In reference to Atget.

[9] N.B. This lecture was accompanied by a simultaneous silent screening of Vertov’s film (constituting an experiment in ‘distraction’ and what Benjamin describes as ‘absent-minded criticism).

[10] Perhaps asking, what is the value of Modernity without a human face?

[11] Even today, curtains are used incongruously but elaborately in conjunction with coloured lights to maintain some trace of these values in the cinema event.

[12] There is some un-mined symbolic potential here in the significance of Chechen Rebels use of a Moscow theatre in a 2002 siege.

[13] See ‘One Way street’.

[14] Again, there is an essay by Benjamin on the subject in which he makes fascinating considerations of the comparative values of the Surrealist revolution with its Marxist counterpart. Benjamin seems to mingled socially with Surrealists during his exile in Paris in the 1930s.

[15] This ‘universal equality’ extends beyond human consideration to encompass the ‘buttons and tickets’ that Benjamin refers to in Dada collage, and also to the tiny events of daily life like reaching for a lighter or a spoon’ which Benjamin says can be glorified by cinema and photography in close-ups and slow motions etc.

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