Page 34 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay 19
become part of their appearance – that is what it means to
breath the aura of those mountains, that branch.
(Benjamin 1985b: 250)

While the experience of aura in Nature is identified with the
singularity of the instant and directly experienced moment of reality,
within the more restricted context of the artwork, aura refers to the
elements that comprise the unique history of a given artefact – its
production at a particular moment in time, its occupation of specific
space, its provenance, and the manner in which these are woven into
the very fabric of the object itself.
Benjamin states that the ‘uniqueness of a work of art arises from
its being embedded in the fabric of tradition’. In this manner the
work of art and the traditions of society are involved in a dialectical
relationship – an ongoing process of mutual modification and
reformulation of which aura is an index. For Benjamin the contem-
porary form of this ongoing interrelationship or ‘dialectic’ consists
of the steady decline of traditional forms of cultural power. Owing to
the mass mediation of society, the social significance of aura
decreases. He suggests that this situation gives rise to another
dialectic; a positive, empowering, socialist dialectic. The rise of
mass-media technologies necessarily and intrinsically coincides with
the rise of the masses. For Benjamin, the dialectical consequence of
a new mode of artistic production was the emergence of new social
relations. From the critical perspective of this book, however, Ben-
jamin’s optimistic interpretation of this close alignment between the
mass and the media is deeply problematic. The following chapters
demonstrate how he correctly identified the central social processes
at work, but he failed to foresee their profoundly negative cultural
consequences – he did not adequately envisage how the masses
would become the malleable target of the culture industry rather
than a self-empowering new social body. Benjamin wrote the Essay in
the historical context of the rise of Nazism; the loss of art’s
traditional aura thus provided a welcome antidote to the fascists’
fetishistic use of images. In relation to contemporary media, how-
ever, subsequent chapters suggest that this fascistic form of fetishism
has merely been replaced by the sophisticated re-creation of fetish-
ism in the much more subtle form of a pervasively commodified
mediascape – a friendly fascism of unthinking consumption (akin to
Marcuse’s notion of surplus repression [1964] 2002). In the sections
that follow the aspects of the media technologies that inspired
Benjamin’s hopes are considered in more detail, before turning to
the reason why ‘the phoney spell of the commodity’ (that even the
optimistically minded Benjamin recognized as a downside to the loss
of aura) has not been broken, but instead, has tightened its hold
over the masses.

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