Page 52 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay 37
In the age of the mechanical reproduction of the work of art,
ideology is never simply that which remains of a tradition which
is being progressively destroyed, nor does it simply exhaust
itself in the reanimation of a tradition in the midst of destruc-
tion. Ideology is also that destruction itself, but as that which
remains, as pure innovation, even as pure repetition without
content.
(Duttmann 2000: 39)
Rather than the empowered distraction Benjamin sensed, ‘pure
repetition without content’ is a good description of the endless
circulation of commodified fragments that characterize the contem-
porary mediascape. Benjamin’s previously cited observation that
mankind is now an object of contemplation for itself fits well with
the current cultural climate of Reality TV shows, celebrity trivia, and
the mechanically reproduced emotion that accompanies such large-
scale media events as the funeral of the Princess of Wales, Live 8,
and so on. In opposition to the fascists’ deliberate misappropriation
of aesthetics, Benjamin called for the politicization of art. For
Benjamin, fascism represented a systematic aestheticization of politics
that necessitated suppressing the intrinsic tendencies of new media,
however, he failed to grasp capitalism’s flexibility – its apparently
uncanny ability to co-opt and exploit the potentialities in which he
had such faith. Quoting Benjamin’s description of life in the Weimar
Republic, Gilloch could equally be providing a concise summary of
the social atmosphere that has resulted as a failure of Benjamin’s
hopes for the media: ‘the most selfish narrowest private interests
combine with the dullest instincts of the mass … The radical
potential of the optical unconscious is reduced to the situation
where: ‘everyone is committed to the optical illusions of his isolated
standpoint’ (Gilloch 2002: 97).
Despite his good intentions and hopeful analysis, Benjamin’s
analysis has proved an inadvertent, albeit important, guide to our
understanding of aura’s decline and its negative cultural conse-
quences. In television coverage of mediated events that Benjamin
did not live to see (such as the Gulf conflicts) we have witnessed
how Benjamin’s desire for a media-radicalized mass with which to
confront fascist tendencies has been co-opted by the corporate, CNN
model. Fascism on a mass scale has been transformed into the ‘thrill
of technomastery’ by the individual viewer as a ‘fascistic subject’
(Meek 1998: n.p.). Society now has a hollow core due to the
superficially neutral, but in reality deeply ideological, nature of the
media technologies themselves. Benjamin hoped that media such as
film would explode like dynamite our ‘prison-world’, ‘so that now, in
the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventur-
ously go travelling’ (Section XIII). In practice, the wide-eyed ramble

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