Page 204 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 204
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
functioning of the media importantly reflects a collective historical expe-
rience of which the media as agents and mediators of “truth” themselves
play a part.
All culture of today is mass culture or, we may say, there is not one
culture unaffected by mass culture. Probably the first author, who indicat-
ed this fact in a decisive, definite, clear and condensed manner, was Walter
Benjamin, whose surprisingly short essay The Work of Art in the Age of Me-
chanical Reproduction made a serious and lasting impact more than twenty
years after it was first published. “The name of Walter Benjamin, the omni-
present godfather, divided between the mysticism and technology (but very
prudent not to mix the first with the other) is imposed by itself: The Work
of Art... (1936) is one of our classics” (Debray, 1994: p. 130). In his dialectical
mind Benjamin really only uncovers the ambiguous potential created by
mass culture, and the question of whether or not the outcome will be social
emancipation, points towards politics. The sentence at the end of the essay,
that confronts fascism and communism in regard to mass culture, is more
than just a slogan stating that fascism is rendering politics aesthetical and
that “communism responds by politicising art”. The underlying assump-
tions, which help a bit to explain this programmatic exclamation, are pre-
sented in the endnote 12, where Benjamin claims that a change in the meth-
od of exhibition “applies to politics as well”. If we read this endnote in view
of its anticipatory dimension, we should comprehend it as a description of
the televised world, before there was any television. Yes, everybody sees
that the print, photography, cinema and so-forth are the result of an intel-
lectual (or the aesthetic) endeavour, but at the same time they are the prod-
ucts of machinery, the products of the process of mechanical reproduc-
tion, and everybody feels that the possibility to bring close to public many
works of art from secluded places, means a change in a way. But in what
way? This is the question, which “just anybody” could not feel important
to answer. Copies of the portrait of Mona Lisa suddenly became accessible
and could decorate a wall in any home, no matter how humble, great novels
of French realism are accessible in cheap editions, etc., so what? This is the
point, where Benjamin‘s intervention proved to be fruitful. Simple as his
discovery may seem (though in the final analysis it is not so simple at all),
it happened as a finally uttered knowledge of the fact, which had been re-
pressed by the dominant “class culture.” In addition, probably it is not just
a coincidence that Benjamin named this “fact” vaguely the aura, which as
a notion gets its meaning through the process of disappearing. The aura is,
202
functioning of the media importantly reflects a collective historical expe-
rience of which the media as agents and mediators of “truth” themselves
play a part.
All culture of today is mass culture or, we may say, there is not one
culture unaffected by mass culture. Probably the first author, who indicat-
ed this fact in a decisive, definite, clear and condensed manner, was Walter
Benjamin, whose surprisingly short essay The Work of Art in the Age of Me-
chanical Reproduction made a serious and lasting impact more than twenty
years after it was first published. “The name of Walter Benjamin, the omni-
present godfather, divided between the mysticism and technology (but very
prudent not to mix the first with the other) is imposed by itself: The Work
of Art... (1936) is one of our classics” (Debray, 1994: p. 130). In his dialectical
mind Benjamin really only uncovers the ambiguous potential created by
mass culture, and the question of whether or not the outcome will be social
emancipation, points towards politics. The sentence at the end of the essay,
that confronts fascism and communism in regard to mass culture, is more
than just a slogan stating that fascism is rendering politics aesthetical and
that “communism responds by politicising art”. The underlying assump-
tions, which help a bit to explain this programmatic exclamation, are pre-
sented in the endnote 12, where Benjamin claims that a change in the meth-
od of exhibition “applies to politics as well”. If we read this endnote in view
of its anticipatory dimension, we should comprehend it as a description of
the televised world, before there was any television. Yes, everybody sees
that the print, photography, cinema and so-forth are the result of an intel-
lectual (or the aesthetic) endeavour, but at the same time they are the prod-
ucts of machinery, the products of the process of mechanical reproduc-
tion, and everybody feels that the possibility to bring close to public many
works of art from secluded places, means a change in a way. But in what
way? This is the question, which “just anybody” could not feel important
to answer. Copies of the portrait of Mona Lisa suddenly became accessible
and could decorate a wall in any home, no matter how humble, great novels
of French realism are accessible in cheap editions, etc., so what? This is the
point, where Benjamin‘s intervention proved to be fruitful. Simple as his
discovery may seem (though in the final analysis it is not so simple at all),
it happened as a finally uttered knowledge of the fact, which had been re-
pressed by the dominant “class culture.” In addition, probably it is not just
a coincidence that Benjamin named this “fact” vaguely the aura, which as
a notion gets its meaning through the process of disappearing. The aura is,
202
