"Politics, technology and the media: the

originality of Walter Benjamin"

João Carlos Correia

Universidade da Beira Interior (UBI)

The approach developed by Walter Benjamin in some of his writings

(especially "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) focuses on the
political implications of new emergent media mainly in what concerns to the
relations with their public. This article will try to characterize the analysis that
Benjamin has launched on the potential inherent in the mass media and cultural
industries.
In this article, we try to conceive a kind of dialogue with authors that help to
illuminate some paradoxical elements from Benjamin theory: here, we consider the
theoretical controversies found in the correspondence between Theodor Adorno and
Walter Benjamin, and, also, some contemporary approaches that emphasises the
prophetical and progressive dimension of his premonitions. We focus our attention
in some consequences resulting from their complex thesis on the significance of the
impact of technology in media production and reception that are still being heavily
discussed, producing complex controversies on the role of media and its potential to
aesthetetization and spectacularization of politics.

Keywords: Benjamin- technology – mechanical reproduction - politics

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 I

Berlin in the twenties was as magnetic attractive poll of dozens intellectuals,

with an original circle simultaneously interested in politics, art and culture: Walter
Benjamin, Siegfried Krakauer; Bertolt Brecht and his friends such as the composer
Kurt Weil and the actress Lotte Lenya. Between 1926 and 1931, living in Berlin and
making frequent trips to Paris, Benjamin produced essays on several subjects:
children’s literature, folk art, art made by excluded groups such as mentally ill and
the emergence of new media radio, photography, cinema and the illustrated press
(Jennings, 2004: 18).
For many intellectuals, Berlin appears as kind of experimental workshop for
a new aesthetics politically committed to the goals of social revolution. But in
opposition to the Marxist orthodoxy, most of those intellectuals considered art too
important to view it as a mere economically determined epiphenomenon. Whereas
the Marxist orthodoxy ultimately condemned modern art as a manifestation of
bourgeois decadence, many of those intellectuals, believed that the new aesthetic
techniques could be transformed from bourgeois and reactionary tools into
revolutionary tools bringing a critical consciousness of the nature of bourgeois
society (Buck-Morss, 1977: 17).
This kind of approach raised a strong interest to the cultural and political
significance of the new media such as radio and cinema. It was in this social and
cultural context, that Benjamin developed a highly unlikely dialogue with both
Adorno and Brecht (each of one suspicious of the other) on the potentialities and
meaning of the new emergent media later baptized as cultural industry.
The approach developed by Walter Benjamin in some of his writings
(especially "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", that develops
a key role in our own essay) focuses on the political and cultural implications of new
media.
A first element to consider is the impact of mass media on traditional

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 experience. According to Benjamin, journalism informative language destroyed the
language of the narrator, which was related to the immediate experience of the
world. At a time when the common memory is lost, narrative forms such as
journalism become predominant. Simultaneously, the development of industrial
capitalism and technical reproduction led to the «desecralization» of culture,
magisterially described by Benjamin as the loss and decline of aura. The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1987) is arguably the most influential of
Benjamin's essays, in which he locates a shift in the status of traditional art as
technical means of reproduction such as photography and film begin to dominate the
imagination of mass public. The development of mechanical reproduction and the
attendant rise of masses lead to a new situation where the uniqueness of the work of
art is increasingly questionable. Benjamin does not disapprove this desacralizing
process: given that the auratic values of uniqueness and authenticity were
themselves, in fact, a perceptual legacy from the work of art’s cultic function, it
follows, for Benjamin, that their elimination will emancipate work of art from its
parasitical dependence of ritual. Benjamin argues:

For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the
work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the
work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility…. 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 kind of praxis: the political one… Today, by the absolute emphasis
on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions,
among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be
recognized as incidental. (Benjamin, 1987: 171-173)

Furthermore, Benjamin identified the impact of technology on individual and

collective reception, showing how mechanical reproduction changes the perception
of reality, developing important intuitions related with the process of mediation.
The film appears as an aesthetic phenomenon that Benjamin claims to be politically
significant.
Why the response of masses towards film is progressive while it is
reactionary towards avant-garde art? Benjamin gives us some answers. First of all,

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film, unlike painting, presents an object for simultaneous collective experience
(Benjamin 1997: 188). Second, through its techniques such as slow motion and close
up, it has the ability to explore deeply the quotidian. It reveals the hidden details on
our quotidian practices and our familiar habitats.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar

objects, by exploring common-place milieus under the ingenious guidance of
the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the
necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of
an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan
streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories
appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this
prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in
the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go
traveling. With the close-up, space expands, with slow motion, movement is
extended. (Benjamin, 1997: 189)

Processing the rush of images of cinema created, Benjamin believed,

subjectivities better able to comprehend the flux and turbulence of experience in
industrialized, urbanized societies. Freed from the mystification of high culture,
media culture could cultivate more critical individuals able to judge and analyze
their culture, just as sports fans could dissect and evaluate athletic activities
Thus, the work of Benjamin emphasise that new conditions of artistic
production and reception. The new visual technologies have a clear promise, to
bring the work of art nearer; to destroy the authoritarian distance between work of
art and masses. At least some features of the essential difference between the author
and the public is about to disappear: “Any man today can lay claim to being filmed”
(Benjamin, 1997:183).
It was not only in the visual arts that Benjamin found changes in collective
reception and perception. Information industry brought about fundamental changes
in literary practice. In journalism, the right to pursue the literary profession becomes
a universal right. Walter Benjamin claims:

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 With the increasing extension of the press (…), the distinction
between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference
becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. (…) literary
license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and
thus becomes common property (Benjamin, 1997: 184).

II

In 1928, Adorno began meeting with Benjamin in Frankfurt and they had a

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series of theoretical discussions. Although there are no specific documentations of
the contents of these talks, they clearly marked the beginning of an important
lifelong dialogue on media, society and politics.
However, when he sends the “Work of Art in the Age of Technical
Reproduction” to Adorno, he reacts with criticism.
Benjamin argues that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of
the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes
into the progressive reaction towards a Chaplin movie” (1987: 187).
Adorno (1999) warns Benjamin against “romanticizing” the laughter of the
masses in the cinema. The laughter of the audience at a cinema," as Adorno puts it
in a famous letter of March 18 of 1936, "is anything but salutary and revolutionary;
it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism instead" (p. 129) .
Adorno, as always, is very emphatic: “The idea that reactionary individual
can be transformed in a member of the avant-garde through an intimate acquaintance
with the films of Chaplin strikes me as simple romantization (Adorno, 1999: 130).
To Benjamin the collective reception of the film affirmed its potential for
mobilizing the masses. To Adorno, the cultural industry, and specially cinema, does
not serve revolutionary purpose, but rather offers entertainment to inattentive
audience at best. As a consequence, Adorno does not see the mass audience become
critic; instead, he finds them deceived into believing in the freedom they have
already lost. It is true that the mechanical devices of reproducible art can increase
some new kinds of accessibility; however, to Adorno these mechanical devices are
used to deceive and to coerce people into believing in the untruths of an unjust
society.
In the seminal essay “On the fetish character of music and regression of
listening” (1982), Adorno implicitly answer to Walter Benjamin claiming that the
technologic progress in mass production of culture was in fact the development of
the regression of taste: the mass audience instead of experiencing cultural objects
consumed it as fetishized objects, the value of which was determined by exchange.
In Adorno’s work (and to most of his other fellows from the Institute of Social
sciences from Frankfurt) there is no place for exploring the democratic opportunities
of mass media detected and emphasised by Benjamin. The integration of the cultural
realm into the system of commodity exchange has as a consequence that only
cultural products that can survive on a capitalist market are produced. The fusion of

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the new technologies with market mechanisms would therefore lead to
standardization, identity, and conformity. As a result, consumers are confronted with
the permanent reproduction of the existing societal conditions. This would lead to
mass deception, manipulation and uniformity, and eliminate every idea of
resistance .Media and mass culture are one factor that prevents the realization of
utopia, destroying personal life and avoiding the growth of independent minds.

To Benjamin, the new conditions of art reception were prophetic,

programmatic of the future transcending the division of labour between artist and
technician, brainworker and art worker. Whereas Benjamin bases modern
reproducible art on politics and equates "progressive" artistic techniques with
“progressive ”political tendency, Adorno thinks that only the formal innovations of
modern art makes it critical of and relatively autonomous from the current political
and socio-economical system.
Benjamin, in pursuing the idea that changing media forms result in change in
the nature of participation, writes:

The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a

disreputable form (movies) must not confuse the spectator. Yet some
people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial
aspect.... Clearly this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the
masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the
spectator. That is a commonplace. (1987: 195)

In the letter written in March 18 of 1936, Adorno clearly despised the

democratic potential of popular culture, emphasising the critical potential of the
autonomous work of art: “I know find somewhat disturbing (…) that you have now
rather casually transferred the concept of the magical aura to the autonomous work
of art and flatly assigned a counter-revoluctionary function to the later (…)” (1999:
130). Adorno goes on emphasising the critical potential of the kind of art that he
believes to be autonomous and critical, quoting as examples of that particular kind
of art the literature of Kafka and the music of Schonberg. And he claims:
“Schonberg’s music is emphatically not auratic”. Aura, to Adorno, is canceled by
modern art itself and not by popular culture. In a clear opposition with Benjamin’s

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concept of aura, Adorno (1999) says: “if anything does have an aural character, it is
surely the film which possesses it to an extreme and highly suspect degree" (1999:
130-131).
Some authors believe that this controversy between those two friends is has
to be explained within the political context of the thirties in Europe. Benjamin and
Adorno have very different evaluations of their historical present. Specifically,
Benjamin, under the influence Bertolt Brecht, continued to support the USSR as
leader of a world proletarian movement, while Adorno decidedly did not. The
Moscow trails of 1935 don’t change his positive evaluation of soviet foreign policy.
However, it seems to be rather simplistic to reduce that controversy to the
contextual historical conditions and to the individual political sympathies from
Adorno and Benjamin. The Benjamin analysis of the new media is much more than
a naïf evaluation of the historical and political conditions of the thirties and of the
rule of the media as tools for revolutionary action.

III

Because of Benjamin’s particular sensibility to the novelty of the emergent

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media his work as been followed by many scholars such as James Carey, Paul
Grosswiller, Arnold Hauser, George Steiner and others that detected some prophetic
intuitions which are suitable to understand the features of contemporary societies.
To same of those commentators, McLuhan and Benjamin share central comments in
their seminal works on the media (Grosswiller, 1998: 115).
According to those commentators, McLuhan popularized Benjamin’s idea
that film and photography introduced the age of technical reproducibility of works
of art. Benjamin stressed and emphasised the impact of media in the evolution of
human sensorium. Before Marshall McLuhan, he understood the message of
technology, selecting the transformation of sound into sight as a critical historical
moment.
Considering the role of cinema, Benjamin, as Mcluhan, argues that the
audience's position vis-à-vis the performance is different than in the theatre. Because
the camera mediates in film, the audience "takes the position of the camera". For its
part, the camera continuously changes its position, so the movie becomes
multiperspectival. By contrast, the stage performance is presented in person, the
actor can adjust to the audience, and the audience must "respect the performance as
an integral whole" (Grosswiller, 1998: 119).
Both agree that mechanical reproduction changes the reaction of the masses
toward art, too. Individual responses to film, by contrast to painting, are controlled
by the collective experience. McLuhan also agrees that print era media, such as
representational painting, foster individualism and that film and electronic media
foster collective participation (McLuhan 1964; Grosswiller, 1998: 119).
Both authors find positive lessons in popular culture. McLuhan (1964)
argues that the popular electronic media, which academicians had ignored, were
important cultural indicators (Grosswiller, 1998: 121).
Benjamin argues the tactility mode of participation provided by the mass
arts, especially film, had led to profound changes. Instead of focusing attention or
contemplation, the public participated in an absent-minded, habitual mode.
McLuhan (1964) states that all multisensorial media- such as television -are by
virtue of that fact of being essentially tactile and unconscious, as opposite to
rational contemplation, fostered by print technology (Grosswiller, 1998: 121)

For James Carey, quoted by Grosswiller (1998: 115) both “Benjamin and

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Mcluhan in their better moments realize that the study of mass media is the study of
the actual constitution of a mode of life in which the media play a central role not
simply as technologies but as part of a project at once technical, social and
epistemological”. In this sense they both bring with them some important
discussions to the scientific field known as cultural studies.
The cultural studies have explored how cultural meanings are reconfigured
and transfigured in the process of its reception. It is precisely in the insights of
Walter Benjamin on the reception of new media and the impact they produce on the
social mediation that we can find some analysis that can be combined with the idea
of active reception and differentiated decoding. With those insights one may
understand certain significant moments of opposition in the midst of vast expanses
of cultural conformity, in cinema, literature and popular music, moments pointing
beyond the vulgar compulsive repetition and standardization of products of the
culture industry (Wolin, 1998: 51)

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 In cultural studies, some progressive authors emphasised that Benjamin, such
belongs to a kind of committed intellectuals (along with Brecht and Ezensberger) that
stress that the decisive factor for the establishment of emancipatory media would be
the abolition of the distinction between consumers and producers of media products.
For them the emancipatory potentials of media arise from the practices of media
producers that is, from the processes of how media are produced. So, Benjamin
establish a theoretical framework able to sustain that participatory media are needed
for the building of more democratic media system at the macro-level, collectively..
Many recent approaches to alternative media follow this vision of abolishing the
division between producers and consumers of media products in order to establish a
more democratic media system.

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 IV

In spite of that, one must not forget that Benjamin brings some dramatic
insights when he speaks about the ahestetization of politics and the politization of
art. He holds that the ritual value of art is analogous to attempts to render politics
aesthetic, as fascism does; conversely, communism's response is to politicize art.
Mechanical reproduction, with its own dialectics, contributes to both the
politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. As he says again in his
famous essay:

[T]he aesthetics of today's war appears as follows: If the natural

utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the
increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will
press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The
destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature
enough to incorporate technology as its organ.... 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 experience of the
first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering
aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. (Benjamin, 1997:
196)

Again, there are many varied readings of this text, ranging from the
revolutionary Marxist assertions, to the more complex analysis focus on spectacle.
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, in war in order to supply the artistic gratification of a perception that has
been changed by technology.
Leni Riefenstahl l's masterpieces of Nazi propaganda Olympia and Triunph
of Will together with other examples of Nazism and Fascism can help us to
understand Benjamin’s point of view. Following closely this interpretation of the
politician's role, Mussolini presented himself as the artist of fascism, the artificer of

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a "beautiful" system and a "beautiful" doctrine. In a Milan speech of October 28,
1923, Mussolini proclaimed: "Those who say fascism, say first of all beauty”. And
in his January 28, 1924, address to the Fascist Party, he defined fascism as a
"doctrine of force, of beauty”. When asked with reference to the March on Rome
episode, "In your trip to Rome, did you feel like an artist who starts his work of art
or as a prophet who follows his own vision?" Mussolini, not by chance, answered:
"Artist” In sum, Mussolini concretely established a correspondence between artist
and politician through reference to his own case, and he identified his artistic work
with the realization of the political project of fascism (Falasca-Zamponi , 1997: 16)
Benjamin thought noted that in the case of fascism, technology,
paradoxically, was not leading to the complete decline of aura and cultic values. On
the contrary, he thought fascism was able to utilize the remnants of auratic symbols
and their mystical authority both to keep the "masses" from pursuing their own
interests and to give them a means to express themselves. With fascism, politics was
becaming a cultic experience. The logical result of this process, claimed Benjamin,
was the introduction of aesthetics into political life (Falasca-Zamponi, 1997: 6-7)
In Fascism, said Benjamin, fiat ars-pereat mundus (let art be created even
though the world shall perish) had become fascism's creed and influenced its
actions. Art was not a means but rather an end, as the futurists claimed.
This particular aspect of the analysis of the ideological functions of
technology has been returned, in some dystopic analysis of late capitalism and the
modern technological apparatus. Susan Buck-Morss suggests that the critique of
media embedded in the intellectual culture of the 1930s remains highly pertinent
today. In the final note appended to the essay work of arte Benjamin (1997:194)
commented: "In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of
which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are
brought face to face with themselves."
What this conjunction of historical/technological events and theoretical
commentary suggests to some interpreters is that an implicit critique of the fascism
of the ‘30s can be renewed in response to the televisual spectacle of events such as
the Gulf War coverage and to the so called military-industrial-media-entertainment
network
The "excitement” around the technological effects offered to the domestic
public by big networks broadcasts of Golf War and by virtual games also returns us

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 to a new mode of infotainment central to the question of the “ahestetization of war”.
Another way to look at the war, as it is presented by big networks and by video
games is through the theoretical notion of the spectacle as it is redefined by Douglas
Kellner:

Under the influence of a multimedia image culture, seductive

spectacles fascinate the denizens of the world and consumer society and
involve them in the semiotics of an ever-expanding world of
entertainment, information, and consumption, which deeply influence
thought and action” (Kellner: 2003, p. 3)

This “permanent opium war” also seems to be fuelled by an economy of

desire. The war video game is also a spectacle; if we look at the worldwide release of
new virtual game wars and its complex connections with television and cinema we get
an indication of the magnitude if this phenomena..

Fascism and Nazism had wielded the new cinema apparatus (and to some
degree television also) to devastating effect, mobilising their population through
propaganda into a state of total war. Today television, computers, cinema and video-
game industry can serve, at least sometimes, the same purpose. Whether we want to
describe our contemporary phase as "electronic," "digital," or "cybernetic", as
“information age” or as “videopolitics age”, cinema as we have known it, has clearly
changed and diversified into a host of experiences and perceptual apparatuses that
Benjamin would not have recognized. So we can only speculate on how he might
have reconciled the contemporary media scene with his warning against the
aestheticization of politics in a global media landscape in which politics and
aesthetics are blended in a significant way.

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 Some final comments

Somewhere between the dark diagnosis of Theodoro Adorno; the cheerful

prophecies of MacLuhan or, at least, of some of their readers and commentator, and
some progressive believers that find in Benjamin the theoretical basis of an
alternative critique of the contemporary use of mass media, we try to find
Benjamin’s own voice, reviewing its statements on the impact of the mass media in
terms of its capacity to transform the social conditions of visibility of classes and
individuals.
The work of Benjamin shows that new conditions of artistic production and
reception are politically significant, bringing with them a potential of change related
with the emergence of masses in capitalist society. However, it is not completely
clear what it would be the direction of Benjamin’s diagnosis in face of the
complexity of the contemporary media landscape. Thus, we hold that Benjamin
foresaw that new mass media are also responsible, in a complex and contradictory
sense, for opening the way to democratic chances related with a new kind of
reception and fruition of cultural goods. In that particular sense, Benjamin’s thought
appears to be much more sensitive to the complexity and ambivalence of the media,
than the approach of most of their companions of Frankfurt School, also responsible
for an intense and original critic of the mass media and cultural industry. Where the
franckfurtian scholars, especially Adorno, Horkheimer, Lowenthal and Marcuse
have saw just reification and the emergence of a commercialized and fetishist
cultural industry, Benjamin made some important intuitions still significant to the
development of contemporary contradictory reflections.
From that little piece and of a long debate, we can to extract only some
conclusion that we found crucial to the characterization of the work of Benjamin.
Many insights from Theodor Adorno in what concerns to the future of cultural
industry were also pertinent. Probably, his profound commitment with a specific
conception of critical art (the music of Schomberg or the literature of Kafka) does
not allowed him to fully understand the impact of the novelty of the new emergent
media, because of his incapacity to face new realities with specific new criteria.

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However, the points of view revealed by new critical thinkers seem to be compatible
with the message from Adorno when he stresses the auratic nature of the visual
media.
Above all, Benjamin seems to be more aware and sensitive to the novelty and
specificity of cinema and generally of new media. He opens a new kind of reflection
on the consequences of technology in the reception of cultural goods. Even if we
don’t agree with some his optimistic conclusions in what concerns to the future of
society, we found in Benjamin had a more inclusive sense of an entire mode of
modern existence. Especially Benjamin seems more aware of the complexity of
masses behaviour in face of the new emergent media, allowing some reflections on
the concept of audience that could not be included in the elitist theoretical
framework subscribed by some of its contemporary interlocutors. Finally, he
understands sharply the message of the new technology, opening the way to some
interesting conclusions of contemporary critics in what concerns with its social and
cultural meaning.
However we cannot ignore the existence of many contradictory appeals
crossing Benjamin’s thought. The worst service we can provide to those theoretical
initiatives is to grant them the status of received wisdom, to assimilate them
uncritically or in its entirety. Benjamin’s way of thinking invites commentary and
exegesis, which can not be mistaken for adulation. After all, no essay by Walter
Benjamin has led is readers and interpreters in many different directions as “The
work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Koch, 1994:205).

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 References:

Adorno, T. (1982).“On the fetish character of music and regression of

listening”. In Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt (Eds), The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader (pp 270-299). New York and London: Continuum International Publishing
Group Ltd.

Adorno, T. & Benjamin, W. (1999).The Complete Correspondence, 1928-

1940.Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Benjamin, W. (1987), «A Obra de Arte na época da sua reprodutibilidade

técnica – 1ª Versão». In Walter Benjamin, Magia e Técnica, Arte e Politica. Ensaios
sobre Literatura e História da Cultura (pp. 165-196). São Paulo: Editora
Brasiliense.

Buck–Morss, S. (1977).The origin of negative dialectics. New York: Free

Press.
Duttman, A. G. (1994).«Tradiction and Destruction, Walter Benjamin’s
politics of language». In Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Eds.), Walter
Benjamin´s Philosophy: destruction and Experience (pp. 32-58). London and New
York: Routledge.

Falasca-Zamponi, S. (1997). Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in

Mussolini's Italy. University of California Press.

Grosswiller, P. (1998). Method is the message: rethinking McLuhan through

Critical Theory. Montréal, New York and London: Black Rose Books.

Jennings, M. (2004). «Walter Benjamin and the European avant–gard». In

David S. Ferris, The Cambridge companion to Walter Benjamin (pp. 18-34).
Cambridge University Press.

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 Kellner, D. (2003). Media Spectacle. New York: Routledge.

Koch, G. (1994). «Cosmos in Film: On the concept of space in Walter

Benjamin’s Work of Art Essay». In Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Eds.),
Walter Benjamin´s Philosophy: destruction and Experience (pp. 205-215). London
and New York: Routledge.

McLuhan, H. Marshall. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of

man. New York: Mentor.

Wolin, Richard (1998). Labirintos: Em torno a Benjamin, Habermas,

Schmitt, Marx, Heidegger e outros. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget.

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