Benjamin, Art, Reproduction, Media

My understanding of the concept of media in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is based on one particular sentence in the article. "The technique of reproduction" [media] "detaches the reproduced object" [message] " from the domain of tradition" [context]. In Benjamin's work, media is how something is transmitted, and with mass media, reproduced and transmitted. In retransmitting/producing a particular object/artwork/message outside of the bounds of its time and place, the new context "reactivates the object reproduced", giving it a new meaning, without the aura of the original.

Benjamin notes that it is not just the photograph, film, or sound recording that has changed the ability to reproduce artifacts, but rather the numbers of their production. He says that "In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new". Mechanical reproduction make reproduction easier and a part of industry in a way that the previous mode of reproduction could not compete.

Photography, a mechanized tool for reproduction, "freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens". Following photography, combining sound and multiple photographic images, Benjamin describes how "These convergent endeavors" became another media, film. Media are able, it seems, to combine to make another type of media.

Other contemporary theories of thinking about media include those who seem to be dazzled by its opportunities, who think it is some sort of supernatural spectacle to be celebrated without thought. Benjamin’s examples of them include such film theoreticians as the man who theorized that film was the new hieroglyph, the man who said it was “a dream”, and the one who thought it was like prayer. He also relies on explanations of acting and the behavior of actors when filtered through a media from Pirandello, a novelist and playwright.

I think Benjamin was arguing against those who blindly accepted and embraced the distractedness of reproduced art, who likely include those who also praise it without thought, calling it “fairylike, marvelous, supernatural”. But even more so than those dazzled by the reproductions, Benjamin is arguing against the fascists. Benjamin equates “The violation of the masses” by Fascism, which “forces [them] to their knees” to “the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values”. He says “[mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rending aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art”. So, by using mechanical means to reproduce ritual values, which is mankind’s destruction, in the form of entertainment and “aesthetic pleasure of the first order”, Fascism is rending politics aesthetic. Whew. Benjamin says that doing so can only result in war.

And he was right. This work, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1936, and mechanically reproduced, dates itself to the few years preceding the start of World War II, as Fascism use their propaganda machines to promote war against their neighbors.