Page 32 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay 1

Introduction: the politics of aura

Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, written in 1936 and known in
English as ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’
(referred to in subsequent pages as the Essay) is one of the most
important texts in media theory. In the space of a few pages it
provides perhaps the first systematic account of the mass cultural
effects of the media technologies that emerged in the first decades
of the twentieth century. It is particularly significant within the
context of this book’s analysis of critical media theory because it
relates directly to the themes of Kracauer and Adorno’s writings and
lays much of the theoretical groundwork for later thinkers such as
Debord and Baudrillard. The Essay focuses upon the way in which
the nature of a work of art is irretrievably altered with the advent of
the mass media and it concerns itself with the wider social effects of
this fundamental development. Earlier writers failed to address the
full nature of this change because they limited themselves to
exploring the implications of individual media technologies on
particular art forms and so failed to consider the broader implica-
tions for the whole cultural environment of a mass-mediated com-
municational infrastructure. In contrast, Benjamin attempted to
identify the general underlying structural conditions of aesthetic
production in the opening decades of the twentieth century. He
takes the whole of society as his target and seeks to understand the
lived-in experience of a mediated world.
Of critical importance for Benjamin’s reading of art and its
mediatization is the physical component resident in all forms of
aesthetic production. This physicality is traditionally regarded as
mere matter – material to be moulded in accordance with wishes of
the artist. Benjamin’s Essay is a seminal piece of work for the way it
prefigures McLuhan’s the medium is the message. It fundamentally
questions this assumption that the physical manner in which media
content is transmitted is essentially neutral – to be determined by

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