Page 44 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay 29
media technology but the product of their fascistic misapplication.
His Essay aims to expose the true character of aura whose ‘uncon-
trolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application … lead[s]
to a processing of data in a fascist sense’ (Essay: Epilogue). Benjamin
is motivated by a profound belief in socialism’s ability to realize the
productive power of new technologies and the masses through
authentic cultural forms, thus avoiding Futurism’s reactionary nihil-
ism. Like the proletariat’s role for Marx, Benjamin saw the masses as
at once both the product of industrial technology and the only force
capable of truly realizing technology’s true potential. As we have
already seen, however, his analysis contains the seeds of its own
critique.
The role played by the masses in the new appreciation of art, in
addition to being interpreted as a politically enabling phenomenon,
can also be seen as containing the roots of art’s total envelopment in
a commodity culture that re-creates a new, but still reactionary,
aesthetic. This new aesthetic based upon the decline of aura is less
overtly horrific than the Futurists’ worship of war, but it still
undermines the radical political values Benjamin hoped to find
within the masses. While fascism, and its hideous manipulation of
aura for political purposes, was defeated, critical theory would
suggest that the Futurist mentality has reappeared within the con-
temporary mediascape – the life-world is no longer regimented by
military oppression but by commodified affluence (again, Marcuse’s
surplus repression). The current relevance of the unacknowledged
criticality within Benjamin’s Essay is aptly indicated by his description
of the extent of the Futurists’ nihilism in which: ‘Mankind, which in
Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian
gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a
degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order’ (Essay: Epilogue). This evocative quota-
tion is repeatedly highlighted in Part 2 as a disturbingly accurate
summary of the latest developments in our contemporary society of
the spectacle. ‘Destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’ is
evident both in terms of the physical carnage of war presented for
passive viewing (the heavily televised Gulf conflicts) and the socially
pervasive phenomena that exhibit the same basic processes of
self-alienation and reactionary aesthetics that Benjamin was percep-
tive enough to fear, but did not live to see – Banality TV.
The optical unconscious that accompanies the advent of technologi-
cal reproducibility marks a qualitative change not only in the way
society views the physical world, but also in the way it views its own
cultural products. The spread of technical values now extends into
the realm of culture and its representations. Photography and
particularly cinema’s obliteration of aura represents a highly effective

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