Page 82 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 73

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

the technical perfection of effects permits the ideological illusion
that reality is as it is represented in the media. Hence their
startling observation that:

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies...
The... film... leaves no room for imagination or reflection
on the part of the audience... hence the film forces its victims
to equate it directly with reality... They are so designed that
quickness, powers of observation, and experience are
undeniably needed to apprehend them... yet sustained
thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss
the relentless rush of facts (pp. 126–7).

Walter Benjamin
For most of the Frankfurt School writers, avant-garde modernist
art and music represented the key sites of resistance to such
cultural manipulation. The obvious exception is Benjamin, close
friend of the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht and author
of a magisterial study of the urban cultures of Paris (Benjamin,
1973; Benjamin, 1999). In a famous essay on ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin sought to
forge connections between the cultural avant-garde and the new
popular media, pitting the emancipatory potential of both
against the traditional myth of the ‘autonomous’ artwork. He
coined the term ‘mechanical reproduction’ to refer to any form
of cultural production characterised by the relatively large-scale
replication of cultural artefacts by means of machine tech-
nologies, where each replica is neither any more nor any less
‘original’ than any other. This was more than a simple matter
of technology, since mechanical reproduction transformed the
nature of aesthetic experience itself. Benjamin argued that much
of the aesthetic power of the traditional work of art had derived
from its status as a unique object, using the term ‘aura’ to refer
to this combination of uniqueness, authenticity and authority,
all of which he viewed as inextricably interconnected. For
Benjamin, aura derived from the artwork’s embeddedness in
cultural tradition, which in turn had its historical origins in the

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