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Contemporary Cultural Theory

religious cult: the sacredness of art is thus derivative of the
sacredness of magical and religious ritual (Benjamin, 1973a,
p. 225). It is this aura that ‘withers in the age of mechanical
reproduction’ (p. 223).
The paradigmatic Frankfurt School response to the decline of
aura was a gloomy cultural pessimism, as in Adorno and
Horkheimer. For Benjamin, however, mechanical reproduction
and non-auratic art provided the initial preconditions, at least,
for the creation of something that could become a cultural democ-
racy. ‘It is inherent in the techniques of the film’, he wrote, ‘that
everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of
an expert’ (p. 233). This might well represent the end of western
civilisation as the high bourgeois intelligentsia had known it, but
that might not be an altogether bad thing. As Benjamin observed:
‘The film makes the cult value recede into the background not
only by putting the public in the position of critic, but also by the
fact that at the movies this position requires attention. The public
is an examiner, but an absent-minded one’ (pp. 242–3).
Adorno shared many of Benjamin’s concerns, but viewed his
antipathy to traditional art and corresponding enthusiasm for
mass culture as essentially one-sided (Adorno, 1980, pp. 122–3).
Adorno was himself neither simply a high modernist nor simply
hostile to mass culture. But it is very clear that modernism seemed
to him an adversarial culture of quite fundamental importance,
and that he could therefore have little sympathy for either
Benjaminian celebrations of the new media or Lukácsian nostal-
gia for literary realism (Adorno, 1980a). The dispute between
Lukács’ anti-modernism, Benjamin’s enthusiastic popular mod-
ernism and Adorno’s tortured and tortuously pro-modernist
dialectic is perhaps the single most intellectually intriguing
incident in the history of western Marxism. For all the acrimony
with which it was conducted, especially between Lukács and
Adorno, the entire debate rested upon the shared assumption of
an antithesis between culture (whether realist or modernist) and
mechanical (rationalised, reified and detotalised) civilisation. But
where Marx had linked that antithesis to the critique of ideology,
and had aspired to its transcendence through revolution, both the
later Lukács and Adorno remained content with its reproduction

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