Lecture Note on Benjamin's 'Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility'
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
(Third Version, 1939)
Central Question:
Under the twentieth-Century conditions of capitalist production and reproduction, how has art developed, and how has it been affected by those conditions?
•A shift in attitudes to art as a result of the introduction of technological means of reproduction:
Because of technological mass reproduction, art has lost its ‘authenticity’ in the capitalist-oriented culture industry of the 20th Century.
•This loss of authenticity is not so bad, for it democratises and politicises art.
5 main ideas:
1) To an ever-greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. (256)
2) The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura by artificially building up the ‘personality’ outside the studio. (261)
3) The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality has become the Blue Flower in the land of technology. (263)
4) Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. (263)
5) On the one hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of action. ... With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. (265)
In short, the main arguments are:
Culture itself has been transformed into an industry; art has therefore become commodified.
Contemporary culture shows how oppressive ideologies are reproduced and disseminated.
New media technologies such as phonographs, epic theatre, and especially film and photography, not only destroy art’s ‘aura’ but demystifies the process of creating art, making available radical new access and roles for art in mass culture.
The spectator has become a participant, or collaborator, who joins the author in deciding meaning in the production of the work of art. In this process, art is ‘successful’ only when it allows critical contemplation by the viewer. This is the profoundly democratic aspect of these new developments.
Key Concepts: The original vs. the copy
The aura (authenticity)
The mass
The critic/expert
Cult value vs. Exhibition value
Progressive reaction (reactionary or fascist vs. progressive or revolutionary)
Distraction
Dadaism
Discussion Questions
1. What fundamental cultural shift does the mass (technological) reproduction of art initiate by replacing earlier conditions of producing and consuming artworks?
2. What kind of relationship is there between photography and cinema? Does photography gradually culminate in the moving images of cinema or imply cinema (ie, foreshadow it from the beginning)?
3. What does Benjamin say about the intersection of aesthetics and politics under Fascism?
Introduction: Kunstpolitik or, the Historical Materialist Perspective on Reproduction [251]
The impact on art of the mass technologies of reproduction (photography/ film):
implications on the theory of art
implications on the existing politics of art (Fascist, socialist)
the revolutionary demands on the Kunstpolitik
The task of Marxist historico-dialectical materialism under advanced modernity:
Theses defining the developmental tendencies of art [as a kind of superstructure] under the present conditions/modes of production [the economic base] can contribute to the political struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to underestimate. [252]
- the manipulations of art in the hands of Fascists (current tendencies)
- the nature of the proletariat art and art as weapon in class struggle
(For the superstructure changes much more slowly than the base, with the effect that cultural phenomena always lag behind the conditions that produce them. For this reason, Benjamin observes the conditions of present culture at the point of their earliest development with an eye for the present state of productive (and reproductive) technologies. He tries to draw attention to changes in the conditions of production as a way of intervening in the process. His theses are, thus, intended as weapons in the war against fascism.)
What would Benjamin argue against the formalist method? Why wouldn’t he accept the way they delineate textual ‘objects’ and then analyse those objects?
I. A Brief History of Reproduction [252]
Reproducibility varies with different historical periods:
Casting and stamping (uniqueness not threatened; limited uses)
Woodcut graphic art (mechanical reproduction of text & images)
Printing as the technological reproducibility of writing
Engraving and etching (images, maps, music) (in the Middle Age)
Lithography (to provide an illustrated accompaniment to everyday life) (in the early 19th C.)
Photography (from hand to eye) (in the late 19th C/early 20th C)
Film (the process of pictorial reproduction could now keep pace with speech)
A qualitative shift around 1900:
Technological reproduction reached a standard that not only reproduced all known artworks, profoundly modifying their effects, but captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. [253]
(Before, the reproduction of an artwork was imitation. Now the reproduction goes beyond 1-1 imitation so much that it is important to think about what it means. When you can have hundreds of lithograph reproductions of almost the same quality of the original, where is the value in the original? And what about those works (such as film) that are made to be reproduced?)
The impact which the reproduction of artworks and the art of film are having on art in its traditional form
What can technological reproduction do? To capture images that escape natural vision (photography)
To put copies of the origin in situations out of reach of the original itself
To produce copies more independent of the original
To depreciate the value of the original
II. Effects of Technological Reproducibility: the Original vs. the Copy [253]
The importance of uniqueness as a prerequisite to authenticity and aura in the original (on whose existence the copy’s reproduction and worth depend):
The technological processes of reproducibility are bringing about the disappearance of das Hier und Jetzt of an artwork, its unique existence in a particular place.
(Detaching the Reproduction from the Original •means we’re attached to a likeness •destroys the ‘aura’ of the original •increases the sense of the universal equality of things)
The Disappearance of an object’s authenticity:
The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it. [254]
(Authenticity is then important and it is measured in space and time. However, the reproduction is ‘freer’ to be placed in situations in which the original cannot be placed.)
· The symptomatic loss of an object’s aura
‘aura’: (unique existence; tied to physical presence; domain of tradition)
- customary historical role played by the works of art
- their ‘ritual function’ in the legitimation of traditional social formations
· With the technology of reproduction the copy is detached from the sphere of tradition (and its originary aura).
- By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique one.
- In permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his own situation, it actualises that which is reproduced.
The social significance of film … is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage.
Reproduction raises questions about the purpose of art
(Another value of the original is tradition. The reproduction refers the viewer to the original. However all this originality came into crisis with works of art made with the new traditions of technological production, as works of art can be made to be reproduced. As such then art was released from tradition. And art for art's sake was born. It no longer talks about social functions, but it instead talks about itself. What is interesting is that the loss of ritual and the artwork for reproduction also makes it political. The value of art is to be measured in terms of cult value or it's exhibition value.)
How does technological reproducibility destroy the ‘aura’ of a work of art? How does Benjamin explain what he means by the term ‘aura’?
When is it possible to recognise ‘authenticity’? Can there be any authenticity without its destruction in technological reproducibility? Do you agree with the statement that the idea of authentic art only emerge when authenticity is a threatened species of artwork?
III. A Decay of the Aura as the Human Collectives’ Mode of Sense Perception, or Massification [255]
How human sense perception is organized depends on the historical circumstances, and the decay of the aura can be explained by its social determinants:
· If changes in the medium of present-day perception can be understood as a decay of the aura, it is possible to demonstrate the social determinant of that decay.
(the aura of a natural object as the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be [255])
(Unlike in the experience of nature, technologically reproduced images, if perfect ones, are missing das Hier und Jetzt of the object which gives it its aura. The difference is like the loss of das Hier und Jetzt of an actor in the passage from stage to screen. But what Benjamin would argue is that cinema makes so much more possible than the stage can do.)
· The increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life and the desire of the masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly and therefore overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by assimilating it as a reproduction (the railway mania, tourist snapshots)
· The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature [mark] of a perception whose ‘sense of sameness in the world’ has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique. [255-56]
· Field of perception mirrors the field of organization of social life (cf. the increasing importance of statistics)
The alignment of reality with the masses and of the masses with reality [under modernity] is a process of immeasurable importance for both thinking and perception. [256]
Why does the masses embrace the destruction of the auratic quality of works of art?
IV. Art Past and Present: from Ritual to Politics [256]
Tradition is an interpretive framework for an auratic object, but tradition is alive and changeable:
- The embeddedness of an artwork in the context of tradition found expression in a cult (in the service of rituals—first magical, then religious).
e.g., the aura of an ancient statue of Venus both in classical Greece (as an object of worship) and in medieval Europe (as a sinister idol)
- Renaissance distinct historical interpretations of the object: ritual vs. art
A History of the Aura:
- From Art as embedded in Tradition to Technologically Reproduced Art
· The artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function.
The unique value of ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value
· The ritualistic basis, however mediated it may be, is still recognisable as secularised ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
· The Renaissance: (Art emancipated from ritual)
Secular worship of beauty developed and prevailed for the following three centuries
(the ritualistic basis in its subsequent decline but art remains auratic)
· The mid 19th C: (Criterion of authenticity does not apply)
l’art pour l’art = a theology of art (a negative theology, in the form of an idea of ‘pure’ art, which rejects not only any social function of art but any definition in terms of a representational content)
· The late 19th C: (photography emerging at the same time as socialism)
The work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility [256];
The criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production and the whole social function of art is revolutionised [256-57]
(Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics)
· The 20th C: massification (Art is then based more on politics)
Why is Benjamin so opposed to l’art pour l’art? (And what relationship between producer, receiver, and art object does this doctrine maintain?)
V. From Cult Value to Exhibition Value: A Quantitative Shift Led to a Qualitative Transformation [257]
Two polar types of value in the reception of artworks and the ability to reproduce objects through different methods of technological reproduction:
Cult value decreases: The work of art was created as an instrument of magic (ie, a religious object)
Artistic production begins with figures in the service of a cult.
- their presence mattered, not their being seen (Altamira cave paintings)
With the ability to reproduce objects, they would have to be kept out of sight in order to maintain their cult value
Absolute emphasis on the cult value with limited reproducibility in prehistoric times
Exhibition value increases: The instrument of magic came to be recognised as a work of art.
With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase (in museum and inevitably in cinema).
- The scope for exhibiting artworks has increased enormously with the various methods of technological reproduction.
- Through the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a construct with quite new functions (e.g., the artistic value).
Photography and film are the most serviceable vehicles of massification, or displacement of cult value.
Art assumes entirely new functions in circulation
What are the differences between art created for its cult value and art produced for its exhibition value?
VI. Art at the Crossroads of Cult Value and Exhibition Value: Photography and Film [257]
Exhibition value in photography drives back cult value on all fronts:
The human countenance (the portrait) as a vestige of cult value in early photography (the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones) [257-58]
- In the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time. [258]
As the human being withdraws from the photographic image, exhibition value for the first time show its superiority to cult value
- Atget around 1900 – photographs of deserted Paris streets
(scenes of crimes to establish evidence—photographic records—hidden political significance—a specific kind of reception—no fee-floating contemplation)
- Illustrated magazines (captions are introduced as directives to images/altogether different from the titles of paintings)
- Film (in which the directives given by captions are even more precise and commanding) in which the meaning of each single picture appears prescribed by the sequence of all the preceding images
VII. The Ill-Considered Standpoints on Photography and Film (Contradictions of Film and Art) [258]
The 19th-C dispute over the relative artistic merits of painting and photography: Is photography art?
(an expression of world-historical upheaval)
· If the age of technological reproducibility separated art from its basis in cult, all semblance of art’s autonomy disappeared forever.
- The invention of photography transformed the entire character of art forever. [258]
The early 20th-C disputes on the nature of film
(a desire to annex film to ‘art’ and to attribute elements of cult to film) [259]
- A sacred and supernatural significance or the sterile copying of the exterior world?
· Film = a step further in the process of representation close to reality
Film has ‘its unique ability to use natural means to give incomparably convincing expression to the fairylike, the marvellous, the supernatural (Werfel)’.
Film is auratic, but its exhibition value is stronger than art.
What does Benjamin describe as some reactionary ways of resisting the camera’s potential to revolutionise people’s sensibilities?
VIII. The Performance Direct and Mediated: Stage vs. Screen [259]
The artistic performance of a stage actor
- directly presented to the public by the actor in person
- with the opportunity to adjust [and react] to the audience during performance
- allowing the audience to have direct access to performance
The artistic performance of a screen actor
- presented through the technological apparatuses (the camera and the recording one)
- subjected to a series of optical tests (camera views and editing)
- with constantly changing audience taking the position of a critic without experiencing any personal contact with the actor [260]
- The audience’s empathy with the actor is really an empathy with the camera
(the position of the camera = the position of the audience => testing (of work) approach)
not an approach compatible to cult value but commodification of actors and cult of celebrity
What does the camera do to the actor of a film role?
What happens to the real person’s stage presence (an auratic quality if the actor is in front of a live audience in, say, a drama) once the camera captures the performance on film?
IX. The Decay of the Aura as the Effect of Film (Art Bound by Technology) [260]
The actor represents himself before the apparatus. [260]
(He is very often denied the opportunity to identify himself with a role. [261])
The Artificiality of Film:
- The actor operates with his whole living person, yet forgoing/sacrificing its aura. [260]
(The aura is bound to his presence in das Hier und Jetzt —there is no facsimile/replica of the aura.)
- Art is completely subject to or founded in technological reproduction.
(‘the best effects are achieved by “acting” as little acting as possible’ in film. [260])
- An actor as stage props chosen for his typicalness and introduced in the proper context;
His performance split into a series of episodes capable of being assembled [261]
Art has escaped the realm of the ‘beautiful semblance’, which for so long was regarded as the only sphere where art could thrive.
X. The Historical Significance of the Film Industry Today [261]
Resulting in the loss of the aura of the person:
The feeling of estrangement before one’s appearance in the mirror
- The mirror image has become detachable and transportable from the person mirrored to a site in front of the public, the consumers who constitute the market beyond his reach.
- Film responds to the shrivelling/withering of the aura by artificially building up the ‘personality’ outside the studio.
- The cult of the movie star fostered by the film industry does not preserve the unique aura of the person but the putrid/decaying magic of the personality’s own commodity character.
However, the ease of replication has other advantages:
- Today’s cinema promotes a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art, social conditions, even of property relations. [261-62]
- The possibility of participation - to be reproduced
(e.g., the newsreel that offers everyone the chance to rise from passer-by to movie extra)
A person might even see himself becoming part of a work of art. Any person today can lay claim to being filmed.
The historical situation of literature today: [262]
- In literary marketplace, the reader gains access to authorship; the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character.
- Literary competence is no longer founded on specialised higher education but on polytechnic training, and thus is common property.
In film, shifts that took place in literature over centuries have occurred in a decade. [262]
- The film industry has an overriding interest in stimulating the involvement of the masses through illusionary displays and ambitious speculations. [263]
How does Hollywood hold the transformative potential of film captive to the imperatives of the profit motive?
How does Hollywood create a bogus aura for the actor?
How does capitalism ‘obstruct man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced’?
Benjamin says in Note 29 that Aldous Huxley’s complaint about the production of literary texts is ‘obviously not progressive’. Why? What view of the transmission of literary culture is Huxley upholding in his observation?
XI. Painting vs. Film in terms of the Representation of Reality [263]
The technological equipments and reproducibility have changed the nature of reality and has created new ways of accessing it (deeper and more analytically).
- The equipment-free aspect of reality, difficult to reproduce, has become the height of artifice (the vision of immediate reality has become the Blue Flower in the land of technology).
Painting vs. Film (Film: new and different from the earlier aura-laden art forms)
Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer/cameraman.
- The enormous difference in the images they obtain: a total image vs. a piecemeal image with its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law [263-64]
- The presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today, since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment. [264]
XII. The Social Significance of Film Today [264]
The Technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the masses towards art:
- the masses’ extremely backward/reaction towards a Picasso painting
- the masses’ highly progressive (=positive) reaction to a Chaplin film
Painting—a stand-alone totality; not for collective experience; inviting a viewer to contemplation
Film—lending itself readily to analysis; rendering one to be a critic; overriding contemplation
Popular culture works with hegemonic forces because it is shaped by mass audience’s response in a feedback loop (lack of appreciation of the truly innovative and purposeful art).
An object of simultaneous collective reception/experience:
- Painting by its nature is not; architecture has always been; the epic poem was at one time;
Film is today. [264]
(Film takes over from the epic poem the function that architecture has always played.)
- Collective simultaneous experience, enabled by film, is not possible even in publicly displayed paintings in galleries and salons.
Film enables the masses to organise and regulate their response [264-65]
(Thus, the same public reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy/grotesque film and inevitably displays a backward attitude towards Surrealism.)
How does Benjamin address the way in which the camera changes both the object captured and the viewers’ perceptive capacity?
Do you find Benjamin persuasive when he implies that the future of a technological mode can be glimpsed in the desire it awakens (eg, to reproduce images in an increasingly detailed way—with sound and, ultimately, of course, in colour or with 3D techniques)?
XIII. A Deepening of Apperception by Film [265]
Film: man’s presentation of himself to the camera;
man’s representation of his environment by the camera
Film has enriched our field of perception (Freudian theory of psychoanalysis) through the testing capacity of the equipment (and its increased involvement):
- Analysable things increased throughout the entire spectrum of optical and auditory perception and by distancing from reality (abstraction of perception)
- Film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera.
- Rapid movement of the camera extends comprehension.
- Film manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of action (travelling).
(With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is expended. [265])
Through the camera, we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. [266]
How does film help overcome the longstanding divide between art and science or technology?
XIV. Shock Effects: Film vs. Dadaism [266]
It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come.
Daddaism attempted to produce with the means of painting (or literature) the effects which the public today seeks in film.
- The dadaists attached much less importance to the commercial usefulness of their artworks than to the uselessness of those works as objects of contemplative immersion — a ruthless annihilation of the aura in every object they produced, which they branded as a reproduction through the very means of production (moral shock effect). [266-67]
- Film initiates perception that is involuntary (physical shock effect)
Painting vs. moving images
(contemplation vs. perception which is unconscious, incidental, unreflective but also provides insight into expanded space with close-ups, extended motion with slow motion bursting the prison-world of perception and launching us on “adventurous travelling”)
- “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” (Duhamel 1930) [267]
The shock effect seeks to induce heightened attention:
- By means of its technological structure, film has freed the physical shock effect—which Daddaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect—from this wrapping.
XV. Reception in a State of Distraction: Architecture and Film [267]
Quantity into Quality:
- The masses are a matrix from which all customary behaviour towards works of art is today emerging newborn.
- The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation.
- The new mode of participation, which first appeared in a disreputable form, was a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence.
Distraction and concentration [268]
- the ancient lament: the masses seek distraction; art seeks concentration from the spectator.
® moral evaluation of film
- A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it … .
By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves.
Distraction of spectacle (consumed by the masses in a state of un-reflection)
vs. Concentration of art (absorption and identification) but What about architecture?
Architecture in terms of Distraction and Concentration
- Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective.
® lasting form (unlike historical forms of art such as panel painting)
- Buildings are received by use and by perception, tactilely (by way of habit) and optically (in the form casual noticing).
The sort of distraction provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to evade such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks wherever it is able to mobilise the masses. It does so currently in the film. Film is the true exercise of art today (in 1930s). [268-69]
- Reception in distraction—the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception—finds in film the true training ground (by virtue of its shock effects). [269]
- The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one.
Why is ‘distraction’ is better than ‘concnetration’ when one is experiencing film or art more generally?
How is it that the masses are able to experience art in a satisfying manner while in what Benjamin calls ‘a state of distraction’?
Epilogue: The Fascist Aestheticising of Politics vs. the Communist Politicising of Art [269]
The increasing proletarianisation of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same processes.
Fascism renders politics aesthetic.
- Fascism attempts to organise the newly proletarianised masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish.
- Fascism seeks to give the masses not their right but expression in keeping these property relations unchanged.
- The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticising of political life
(the Führer cult, apparatus in the service of production of ritual values)
- Only war, in which all efforts to aesthetised politics culminate, makes it possible to mobilise all of today’s technological resources while preserving traditional property relations.
- Fascist glorification of war is the ultimate rendering of politics aesthetic & artistic gratification of a sense perception changed by technology (Futurists celebrate war: see Marinetti’s manifesto)
l’art pour l’art [290]
- Human-kind which once was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. The self-alienation of art has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
Communism politicises art
- Art has no purpose in totalitarian regimes except to organize rituals of public life
In what way does fascism transform politics into aesthetics? (In what sense did Hitler succeed in crafting himself and People into an aesthetic object?)
Why does this transformation lead inexorably to a society organised entirely around the preparation for and waging of war?
How is it possible that human beings can experience war—a profoundly self-destructive act—as pleasurable?
What warning does Benjamin’s analysis of the Nazis’ success in exploiting film’s potential hold for those who concern themselves with art? Do you think that Benjamin’s Marxist claims about the revolutionary power of the movie camera as a mode of ‘technological reproducibility’ are convincing in the light of such abusive treatment by reactionary movements?
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