DANM202 Khazar Presentation On Benjamin

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

An Opinionated Essay

 

James Khazar

DANM202 Cultural Theory & Research

Winter 2006

(Download the PDF)

A Review

It's fortunate that I read the Marxist Manifesto in Danny Shea’s Theater, Drama & the Pixar Feature seminar last quarter, because in my first reading of this essay I was most fascinated by  Walter Benjamin's brilliant insight into the nature of the artistic aura. However, in rereading it has become more apparent to me that Benjamin had a real distaste for this aura, and saw it as the value of art that was holding back art’s progress as a Marxist tool and to allow its use as a fascist tool.

Benjamin sets up the premise that Marxism has made it possible to perceive a new superstructure within art theory made newly possible by the process of mechanical reproduction. He hopes that this new theoretical superstructure can be used to take aesthetics out of the hands of the Fascist, where it is used as a tool to control the masses, and move it into the sphere of the political where it can be used as a Marxian dialectal tool.

He proposes that traditional art has depended on creativity and genius, but photography and film have released it from the confines of physical talent, and moreover have rendered the mechanical reproduction of art possible, but structurally inherent. This reproducibility has had the remarkable effect of removing from art it's inherent "aura," that is it has taken away the property of art which is its uniqueness as a physical object in time and space. It has been this aura, he feels, which has held art back from being free of its elitist and bourgeois entanglements.

He contends that art history has until this time not put the development of art into a socio-political perspective. Only recent technological developments have made it possible to do so. He says: "To pry an object from its shell, to destroy it aura, is the mark of a perception (the perceiver being the advanced or conscious proletarian) whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' (that is, it's Marxist communal egalitarian sense) has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction" 1 . In other words, the evolved Marxist proletarian uses reproduction to bring art into the political realm.

He also says: "The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception." 2 In other words: By reproducing images of reality thru photography in picture magazines, the proletariat sees a new “de-elitisized” reality which by seeing they can also control. In Benjamin’s opinion this is hugely powerful both for art theory and art practice.

The place of art in culture is malleable and has changed over history, he continues. It started as a magical object, became a cult object and then was displaced by the "cult of beauty" in the renaissance. When reproduction comes around art reacted by turning itself into its own cult, with “l’art por l’art” (art for arts sake) – something which removed art even further from the needs of the proletariat, and Benjamin implies that this may have been a bourgeois reaction against socialism as well. The key point of Benjamin is here: that "for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." 3 A Marxist dialectical art would require this emancipation since Marx himself said: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." So Benjamin concludes: "Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics."

Benjamin has a lot more to say and prove about the removal of art from ritual and the importance of motion pictures. The new art forms, particularly motion pictures, by their very nature and internal structure, move away from the contemplative and toward the distractive. This movement is fundamental to the removal of art as an elitist bourgeois object into its use as a subverstive political dialect object.

He summarizes in his epilogue that ritualistic art, or "aesthetics", under the control of a Fascist cult, is used to allow the masses expression without access to their rights as a proletariat,  – the right to the overthrow of property-based capitalism. The Futurists are the natural outcome of ritualistic practices in art as exploited by fascism, obvious in their motto "Fiat ars – pereat mundus" (let art be created – though the world shall parish). Fascism uses the aesthetics of art, where communism must counter it by politicizing it. Benjamin has made the case that art, through the sea-change of reproduction, can be politicized, made dialectic and used against Fascism.

My Point Of View

Since the first impression Benjamin made on me was his insight into the auralistic and ritualistic roots I want to return the issues he presents in his fourth section on the malleability of arts purpose through history, from magical object to an expressive object for the Renaissance cult of beauty to the emancipated political object in the age of reproduction. It is fascinating to consider of this very astute articulation of progression, while at the same time I have to disagree that this progression is exclusive. That is, just because art has progressed to a place in history where it can shed its elitist underpinnings doesn't mean it has to, nor does keeping an objects aura and aesthetic qualities necessarily mandates its position as a fascist or even capitalist tool.

Freud vs. Jung

In section XII of his essay Benjamin makes a fascinating analogy between Freudian slips and the ability of motion pictures to capture the unconscious motivations of an actor in a film that allow for artful expression unlike any art-form preceding it. This is interesting in itself, but I think I break off from the Freudian scientific view for the same reason Carl Jung did, for its lack of a humanist or even auristic perspective on human creativity. Freudian analysis of unconscious subtexts is useful, particularly in from a Marxist dialectic perspective. With it you can evaluate the deeper motivational meanings in a work of art. However, Jung and his descendants felt that this access to hidden human motivations was foundational but not sufficient to evaluating the human mind and cultural condition 4 .

Where Benjamin has brilliantly detected this Jungianistic aura, he went well beyond Freud who would be unable to detect it in his formalistic interpretation of motivations. But Benjamin in finding this magical root of the creative expression of humanity has chosen to place it as an obstacle to human progress. This strikes me as a fundamental error, one which stems from his adaptation of Marxism as the super-superstructure of all his analysis in this essay. Marxism was without a doubt the most freeing form of critical analysis of its era, but it strikes me that Benjamin has thrown out the metaphorical baby, the need of individual human beings to express themselves, with the rhetorical bathwater.

Gnosticism, Elitism, and the Opiate of the People

By choosing the Marxist point of view that "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." 5 Benjamin looses sight of the important value of art as a ritualistic object. True enough that organized religion had been and continues to be anti-proletarian and pro-captialistic, but there is still within humanity a need to create objects that are not useful to either capitalistic gain (ask an artist) nor a Marxist dialectic.

Benjamin and any good Marxist would contend that this creative object is by its nature elitist. Benjamin felt that reproduction would remove this elitism by removing the aura of the creative object. Perhaps, but it in no way lessens the value of the aura itself. Its more a question of what kind of value this is, and I see it as a Gnostic value, one in which humanity, proletarian or otherwise, can find only through contemplation and the discovery of personal knowledge, whether about oneself or about the nature of the universe. Benjamin, I believe, even in having found this interpretation of the aura, fails to see this value, which is sad, because he was so brilliantly insightful.

Afterthoughts

It is interesting that in seminar we discussed the common practice of early readings of Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction have the neophyte reader fixing upon the revelations of Benjamin’s concept of the Aura, and indeed having found the jewel, frequently tossing out the remainder of the content of the essay. This third reading of mine has been required for me to discover some of other meanings of Benjamin’s essay, in fact what seems obviously to be the main one of his intent. It’s also interesting that in our discussions it’s become clear to me that I’ve swung like a pendulum, feeling almost betrayed by Benjamin’s abandonment of the aura as soon as he discovers it. I am no doubt wrong in my re-evaluations, and indeed one must consider the relationship of Benjamin’s aura and Benjamin’s aura-less reproduced artwork as a dialectic in itself, the one being necessary to compare, contrast and balance against the other. Without having defined the aura, it would be impossible for Benjamin to make the case, as he so eloquently and originally does, that the popular arts, while being perhaps lacking the in their uniqueness and inherent genius, are in fact valid as a form of cultural expression and one which can be more readily used as a dialectic tool. In rethinking this, it is in fact not directly stated by Benjamin that the aura is inherently wrong, just inherently structured to prevent the proletariat access to it. The one, however, begets the other and both are necessary for a complete dialectic.

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