Page 42 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay 27
a self-determining body, fully adapted to the environment capital has
imposed on them and thereby capable of making its own changes to
that environment. The camera requires both a complex education of
the sensorium, and at the same time provides a means of anatomiz-
ing, revealing and deconstructing the specific training involved in
that education. The problem with this argument, however, is con-
tained within Adorno’s basic insight that knowledge of the culture
industry’s workings is not sufficient guarantee of empowerment. In
fact, as Goldman and Papson (1996, 1998) point out in their
detailed studies of contemporary advertising, the culture industry
often builds into its content deliberate signposts to its manipulations
of consumers for whom compensation is to be found in recognizing
the ‘knowing wink’ and thereby feeling part of a sophisticated joke.
A major element of Part 2 is its updated account of Adorno’s notion
that consumers tend to connive at their own oppression – they work
the magic of commodities upon themselves. As Žižek (1989) has put it
much more recently, the problem with the ideology of the contem-
porary mediascape is not Marx’s notion of false consciousness in which
the masses do not realize what they are doing, but, rather, the way in
which ideology now resides in various forms of ideological manipu-
lation that are readily apparent to the masses – but they continue to do
what they are doing anyway (a notion we return to in our conclusion).
Benjamin foresaw the revelatory properties of the media technolo-
gies but failed to see how ideological manipulation can still occur
despite (and often because of) such a realm of apparent openness.

The political implications of the decline in aura
for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction
emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence
upon ritual … 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 practice – politics.
(Essay: Section IV)

From Benjamin’s perspective, conditions of aesthetic production and
reception are of great political significance. In the Essay’s epilogue
Benjamin maintains that the failure of society to accommodate the
productive forces of technology results in the latter’s distorted
expression in the form of war:
Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in
the form of ‘human material,’ the claims to which society has
denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society
directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of

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