Steve Watson

Observations on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

You might think that such a widely cited and referenced work had something significant to say about the nature and significance of reproduction, but I find that what is said is mostly trivial or just wrong-headed. In particular, I note that Benjamin is aware that mechanical production is not the same thing as reproduction – whatever that might be precisely – but then he doesn’t seem to keep that distinction in mind when he’s talking about the art forms in which mechanical production is the very condition of existence.

• Much is made of the significance of an ‘aura’ which is merely a shorthand way of talking about everything that makes an object unique – and in the materialist universe that can only be such things as its history, accidents of production, precise relationship to other objects, and so on. All of this is to stand in for its quiddity or haecceity and much significance is attributed to this as justifying a distinction between the art object that possesses one particular aura against another object which as its reproduction must lack it. But in the age of mechanical production the aura simply attaches to the stage before the object itself: to the negative rather than the film, to the music performance rather than the recording (or to the recording rather than the playing;) to the musical score rather than the performance (or to the particular performance rather than the replaying;) and so on. None of this seems to be particularly significant: we’ve had the problem since woodblocks and printing, and since these have existed for a thousand years in China for example, without causing any notable sociological impairment of their artistic sense, it seems unlikely that it is that that has resulted in the difficulties of modern art in the West.

• He also talks about the way that the rejection of the significance of the aura-possessing object goes hand in hand with the turn away from the ritual aspect of the artwork, but this has been going on for millennia rather than following on from the industrial revolution. Again, there is a failure to properly justify the large claims being made, or even to test them against clearly available control cases – like China and India, for example, in both of which cases we see different relations of ritual and art and no real relationship between these relationships and the mode of production (capitalist or feudal or ‘oriental.’)

• There’s a lot of talk about how our perceptions are changed, but this is just an example of the standard continental habit of making profound-sounding statements whose significance vanishes like cotton-candy in water with the slightest inspection. All he is talking about is our style or representation of what we perceive: nothing that he describes is relevant to a claim that our perceptions have changed. That claim, on the other hand, could be made in some respects. The fact that we have a changed understanding of certain aspects of the sensed world or that we are familiarised with new ways of modifying our senses could mean that our perceptions have changed – not our sensations obviously which is a physiological fact about us that has no relationship to our culture, but our interpretations at the most basic level even before consciousness (if ‘perception’ can be allowed to include pre-conscious processing of sensations.) The ‘modularity’ (in Fodor’s sense) of the perceptual mechanisms makes this a bare possibility and would be an important discovery if true. Nothing Benjamin says here is at all relevant to that possibility.

Because I was curious about Benjamin’s high reputation, I looked at Clive James ‘Walter Benjamin’ in Cultural Amnesia (pp. 47-56,) and I see that James is rather of my own opinion. Of Benjamin’s most famous essay, James comments that of the productions of that sort of intellectual:

[it] is atypical for featuring a general point designed to be readily understood. Unfortunately, once understood, it is readily seen to be bogus.