Page 48 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay 33
industry thesis, means that, despite often being left-leaning commen-
tators, they frequently fail to engage critically with the full extent of
the political implications of the conceptual banality produced by the
media (a failure examined in Chapter 8). To this extent they often
risk patronizing the working class they seek to represent with
ill-conceived notions of empowerment. The negative aspects of mass
reproduction insufficiently developed by Benjamin are the basis of
the much more critical accounts of the subsequent chapters. The
true dialectic is one in which disempowerment of the masses is
produced by industrialized distraction.
In this more critical context, Jameson (1998) identifies the
Enlightenment’s forces of secularization and realism as the first stage
of an ongoing historical evacuation of aura in a process he distin-
guishes from Benjamin’s notion of empowerment. Jameson prefers
to talk of a dialectic of reification which:

seizes on the properties and the subjectivities, the institutions
and the forms, of an older pre-capitalist world, in order to strip
them of their hierarchical or religious content … what is
dialectical about it comes as something like a leap and an
overturn from quantity into quality. With the intensification of
the forces of reification and their suffusion through ever
greater zones of social life (including individual subjectivity), it
is as though the force that generated the first realism now turns
against it and devours it in its turn.
(Jameson 1998: 148)

This identification of a transformation from quantity into quality
recalls Benjamin’s similar description of the quantity/quality transi-
tion induced by the mechanical reproduction of images. Jameson
argues that this process, which drives modernity’s liquidation of
traditional hierarchical society, results in its own demise in the form
of a postmodern undermining of modernist values. The quantitative
increase in mechanical production is achieved only at the price of
the implicit and widespread acceptance of cultural outputs in
overwhelming commercial terms. It is at this point of cultural
alignment between media technologies and commodity values that
previous barriers between the cultural and economic spheres dissolve
4
(in Marx and Engel’s words ‘all that is solid melts into air ’) on an
unprecedented scale – the commodity’s social role significantly
expands as it simultaneously becomes an economic and culture-
defining concept.
From this perspective, the transformation of art’s reception from
one of contemplation to a ‘state of distraction’ is important, but for
reasons directly counter to those offered by Benjamin. Mechanical

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