The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

First published: “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 1936, 1955 (English translation, 1968)

Type of work: Art history

Form and Content

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a longish essay, divided—in its 1955 version—into fifteen chapters plus a foreword and an afterword. Walter Benjamin’s argument progresses from a general discussion of the changes wrought by technological development on the production of art to a more specific discussion of photography and film as singularly modern genres which alter the viewer’s relationship to art in general.

The changes Benjamin made in the second version of the essay do not constitute a major rethinking of his thesis; rather, they help to define the chief elements of his message and to place it within the context of European politics. In this context it is important to remember that Benjamin wrote the essay while in exile. For example, in making what had been the first chapter into a foreword and what had been the last chapter into a postscript, Benjamin placed his statements on art within the larger context of remarks on Fascism and war. The foreword shows Benjamin’s “redemptive aesthetics,” and in it he claims that the concepts he will develop are “completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” The afterword returns to this larger political question by contrasting reproducible art with the Fascist art form known as war. Fascism aestheticizes war, while Communism politicizes art. Thus, Benjamin has drawn a closed circle around his essay by twice formulating, with variations, a single contrast between Communism and Fascism.

The first five chapters of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” give an extremely compressed history of art in terms of its ever-increasing reproducibility. This history will lead to the point, made later in the essay, that with the invention of photography and film, artworks have reached a point at which they are inseparable from the concept of their being reproduced. This inseparability can be understood in a practical sense: As opposed to most other art forms, films are so costly that their whole production process is ruled from start to finish by the condition that they be reproducible for mass consumption. Yet, in chapter 9, Benjamin also explores film’s reproducibility in a formal sense: The actor’s method changes from that of creating a role to that of presenting himself. Characters are composed in films from heterogeneous effects and are a pastiche of performances that may occur at widely spaced moments and in widely varying situations. For the film viewer, the fullness and distance (aura) of a stage appearance are replaced by a flickering thinness and the merciless investigation of reality by the camera. Similarly, Benjamin declares that the public’s reception of a film is that of the camera. “The audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing” (chapter 8). Years of theater and film-going had taught Benjamin the difference between a theater audience, which sits in reverent silence, afraid even to cough during a performance, and a film audience, which feels free to exchange quiet comments and critiques during the showing.

This new critical attitude toward art on the part of the public, which the foreword and afterword show to be the real object of Benjamin’s analysis, contrasts sharply with the traditional status of artworks. The “aura” of a work both derived from and was responsible for its religious status. (With the nineteenth century notion of art for art’s sake, the work of art retained its traditional authority, although the source of that authority was different.) Aura, which Peter Burger has defined as the work’s unapproachability, depends upon the art object’s uniqueness and authenticity, both of which by definition disappear in its reproductions. An example of aura would be a religious icon or, in the secular world, the charisma with which a stage actor holds his audience spellbound. Historically, Benjamin sees the increasing reproducibility of artworks as inversely proportional to the strength of their aura, to their religious content and usage, and to their hiddenness from the general public. Reproducible art is always already exhibited to a public. This historical argument takes up the first third of the essay.

For Benjamin, the invention of photography was the turning point in the history of artistic aura. Chapter 6 thus opens with the provocative generalization that “in photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line.” The use of early photographs for remembrances of the departed provided the new art form with a kind of compensatory aura. Benjamin emphasizes that photography did not replace painting as the leading art form. Rather, it changed the whole conception of what art is and what it is supposed to do. Moving pictures accomplished the same revolution in a much more profound way. The last third of the essay goes into the details of filmic art.

Critical Context

The uniqueness of Walter Benjamin’s criticism lies in its combination of religious mysticism, philosophy, and politics. Benjamin came to the last category, in the form of Marxism, relatively late in his short life. His politicization can be seen as a symptomatic reaction to the alienation of intellectuals within the Weimar Republic and to the rabid anti-Semitism of the German Right, which would force him first to leave Germany and eventually to take his own life. Marxism remained a kind of protective shell for the unworldly Benjamin, rather than becoming his bone and muscle. He thus had no problem writing simultaneously in two opposing modes, on Brecht’s theater of the concrete and on Franz Kafka’s metaphysical world in “Franz Kafka” (1943; “Franz Kafka—On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” 1968).

Yet precisely this balancing act between Jewishness and Marxism, between mysticism and materialism, defines the achievement of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as well as of Benjamin’s other essays. It allows the essay to turn away from the Marxists’ focus on the ideological content of works of art to the more elusive question of the influence of historical conditions on the form of artworks and vice versa. Benjamin’s criticism in general has had a profound influence on later Marxist cultural critics such as Fredric Jameson. Benjamin’s essay fails when measured against its own attempts to foretell the future. As a history of art it is too sketchy and compressed to be counted a success. Yet Benjamin’s failures are always more interesting and important than other people’s successes.

Interestingly, the importance of Benjamin’s essay lies not in the realm of art history but in the realm of Marxist cultural theory. In spite of its utopianism and mysticism, or rather because of its utopianism and mysticism, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has the same liberating effect upon Marxist criticism as Benjamin had hoped film art would exercise upon the masses’ perception of social reality. Marx, as Maynard Solomon notes, had revealed the “petrifaction of human relations in the ’things’ of class society. Benjamin tried to show us how to break the spell.”

Bibliography

Allen, Richard W. “The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film Theory,” in New German Critique. XL (Winter, 1987), pp. 225-240.

Caraher, Brian G. “The Work of Discourse in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Works and Days. II (Spring, 1984), pp. 7-18.

Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” in New German Critique. XL (Winter, 1987), pp. 179-224.

Jennings, Michael W. Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism, 1987.

Kazis, Richard. “Benjamin’s Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Cinema. XV (July 20, 1978), pp. 23-25.

Ridless, Robin. “Walter Benjamin,” in Ideology and Art: Theories of Mass Culture from Walter Benjamin to Umberto Eco, 1984.

Roberts, Julian. Walter Benjamin, 1983.

Wellek, Rene. “Walter Benjamin’s Literary Criticism in his Marxist Phase,” in The Personality of the Critic, 1973. Edited by Joseph Strelka.

Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, 1982.

Wright, Kathleen. “The Place of the Work of Art in the Age of Technology,” in Southern Journal of Philosophy. XXII (Winter, 1984), pp. 565-583.