Page 21 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 21
benjamin‘s notion of mass culture and the question of emancipation
nomena that happens to be the object of it, is the environment within which
we happen to live. Therefore, an “external” position, somehow similar to a
position of an anthropologist researching a closed culture of a remote tribe,
is practically impossible. “Value-free” judgements are then consequently
almost unfeasible since most judgements are expressed in aesthetic, moral
or ideological categories. Any attempt to “describe” the phenomena means
taking a stand, whether we want it to or not. In addition, no matter how so-
phisticated it may be, such an attempt is a discursive investment into a vast
context of culture, which is in most cases marked by signifiers in a culture’s
representations. Therefore, all culture of today is mass culture or there is
not one culture unaffected by mass culture. Probably the first author, who
indicated 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 Mechanical Reproduction made a serious and lasting impact more
than twenty years after it was first published. “The name of Walter Benja-
min, the omnipresent godfather, divided between the mysticism and tech-
nology (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).
Contours of Benjamin‘s Concept of Mass Culture
Walter Benjamin, in his presentation of mass culture, as we can decipher
it from the above-mentioned essay, sought to reveal mass culture’s mech-
anisms. He pointed out its economic and historic profile from within the
perception of already existing structural transformations, which had deci-
sively modified aesthetic elements contained within it. Before Benjamin’s
discourse unfolds, he states that his intention was based on Marx‘s theo-
ry of interdependence between the economic substructure and the super-
structure, which contains “prognostic requirements” concerning the aboli-
tion of capitalism. However, Benjamin’s Marxism was quite an unorthodox
variance, which later on happened to be named “Gothic Marxism” (Co-
hen, 1993: p. 18). This is manifested in a nuance of Benjamin’s articulation
of the interdependence of substructure and superstructure: “The transfor-
mation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that
of substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all ar-
eas of culture the change in the condition of production. Only today can
it be indicated what form this has taken” (Benjamin, 1969: p. 218). Contra-
ry to what an orthodox Marxist outlook of the time would have advocated,
the epistemological turn (which becomes ever more apparent through his
19
nomena that happens to be the object of it, is the environment within which
we happen to live. Therefore, an “external” position, somehow similar to a
position of an anthropologist researching a closed culture of a remote tribe,
is practically impossible. “Value-free” judgements are then consequently
almost unfeasible since most judgements are expressed in aesthetic, moral
or ideological categories. Any attempt to “describe” the phenomena means
taking a stand, whether we want it to or not. In addition, no matter how so-
phisticated it may be, such an attempt is a discursive investment into a vast
context of culture, which is in most cases marked by signifiers in a culture’s
representations. Therefore, all culture of today is mass culture or there is
not one culture unaffected by mass culture. Probably the first author, who
indicated 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 Mechanical Reproduction made a serious and lasting impact more
than twenty years after it was first published. “The name of Walter Benja-
min, the omnipresent godfather, divided between the mysticism and tech-
nology (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).
Contours of Benjamin‘s Concept of Mass Culture
Walter Benjamin, in his presentation of mass culture, as we can decipher
it from the above-mentioned essay, sought to reveal mass culture’s mech-
anisms. He pointed out its economic and historic profile from within the
perception of already existing structural transformations, which had deci-
sively modified aesthetic elements contained within it. Before Benjamin’s
discourse unfolds, he states that his intention was based on Marx‘s theo-
ry of interdependence between the economic substructure and the super-
structure, which contains “prognostic requirements” concerning the aboli-
tion of capitalism. However, Benjamin’s Marxism was quite an unorthodox
variance, which later on happened to be named “Gothic Marxism” (Co-
hen, 1993: p. 18). This is manifested in a nuance of Benjamin’s articulation
of the interdependence of substructure and superstructure: “The transfor-
mation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that
of substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all ar-
eas of culture the change in the condition of production. Only today can
it be indicated what form this has taken” (Benjamin, 1969: p. 218). Contra-
ry to what an orthodox Marxist outlook of the time would have advocated,
the epistemological turn (which becomes ever more apparent through his
19
