Walter Benjamin's essay
The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility is a classic
that is often taught in a variety of philosophy courses, especially
philosophy of art, and it's also
a very challenging one.
So I am gonna present a few themes from it today.
I'm Dr.
Ellie Anderson, I'm a philosophy professor and co-host of Overthink
podcast.
As with all
works of philosophy, offering an introductory lecture to it, especially
such a short one, is going to be limited.
And so please go ahead and read the essay yourself if you haven't yet.
But I'm hoping this can be an invitation into some of the themes
from the essay that will help you make a bit of sense of it.
Now, there are three different versions of the essay that were published.
I'm using the one that is in the
Aesthetics Reader: A Comprehensive Anthology,
which is what I'm using for this playlist on the philosophy of art and aesthetics.
It's one that I've used in the past while teaching philosophy of Art
for Benjamin in the 1930s,
it's very important to recognize that changes in the conditions of
production have brought about major changes in both art and the way we
perceive art.
Benjamin would say
even perception in general, specifically, the changes in conditions of production
have allowed for a new kind of reproducibility, mass reproducibility.
Before the invention of photography, you wouldn't have been able to see
the Mona Lisa other than literally
at the Louvre or in a drawing,
a rendering of the Mona Lisa.
But once we have photography and the increasing accessibility of photographs
in the 20th century in particular, after the invention of photography in
the 19th century, it becomes suddenly possible for many people the world
over, millions of people to see the Mona Lisa without actually going
to the Louvre.
And this
is not to say nothing of the invention of
film, which Benjamin is also really
interested in, the way that the moving image, not just photography, but moving
pictures, catalyzed different ways of
perceiving things.
He begins the essay by quoting Paul Valery as saying
the following: in all the arts, there is a physical component which can no longer
be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected
by our modern knowledge and power.
For Benjamin, the reproducibility
of artwork through photographs and film renders possible a new way of
thinking about the original versus the copy and of the physical object of art
versus the derivative
copy of it right through the photograph or the moving image.
And the term that Benjamin uses to render this difference is aura.
He says The original work of art has an aura, whereas reproductions
lack the aura and the status of the aura is a fraught one in this essay.
I definitely misunderstood it when I was first reading it as an undergrad
because I thought that Benjamin was lamenting the loss of aura through
the era of mechanical reproducibility, whereas in fact he has a bit more of an
equivocal stance.
Some scholars
think that he's actually affirming the loss of the aura because of the
new possibilities of experiencing art, that the loss of aura is
generating especially, revolutionary
possibilities because Benjamin is a fundamentally political thinker rooted in
Marxism.
Others have a more nostalgic
interpretation of Benjamin as actually
wanting to preserve the aura.
And it's interesting
to track the three versions of the
essay that Benjamin wrote in
the 1930s to see different iterations of the way that the aura appears or
the relation to the aura appears.
However, because this is an introductory level video, I will limit it to the
definition that Benjamin offers of
the aura.
Here he says that the aura is the here and now of the work of art.
It's the work of art's presence in time and space.
It revolves to the unique existence of the work of art.
And this is what withers in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Because the technique of reproduction, Benjamin says, detaches the reproduced
object from the domain of tradition.
And reproductions in principle are infinite, right?
There's only one original Mona Lisa, but there could be
infinite images of the Mona Lisa.
And so this plurality, let's say, of the reproductions is substituted for
the unique existence of the work of art.
Benjamin also speaks of aura in natural objects and says here that the aura
is a unique phenomenon of a distance.
He says, if while resting on a summer afternoon,
this is page 330, if you're
following along, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon, or
a branch which casts its shadow over you.
You experience that aura of those mountains, of that branch and that this
image makes it easy to understand the basis today of the decay of the aura.
The decay of the
aura for Benjamin relies on
two circumstances.
The first is the desire of the masses in contemporary society to bring things
closer spatially and humanly, he says, so to overcome that perception of a
distance that we have with the aura.
And the second is the overcoming of the uniqueness of every reality by
accepting loss of distinction
or a blurring of the lines between the original and the reproduction.
A work of art's uniqueness, which is related to its aura, is
inseparable from being embedded within the fabric of a tradition
according to Benjamin.
And traditions, of course, change over time.
Cultures change over time.
And so the way that the sculpture of the Venus de Milo was perceived by
the ancient Greeks around the time of
its of its creation
is very different from the way that those who would now see the sculpture
in a museum would relate to it.
But either way, there is an embedding within a tradition, and
this is what we really
lose with the loss of aura.
Of course, Benjamin is writing in the 1930s, but it might be even
more interesting to relate what he's saying to some of the contemporary
developments in art, whether it's AI art or digital art, or any other forms
of contemporary art that weren't really
around when Benjamin was writing
nearly a hundred years ago.
Now, Benjamin is quite interested in the way that works of art are received, and he
says that there are two different plains or poles of valuing art traditionally,
one of which is cult value, and the other of which is exhibition value.
Cult value is based on ritual, and here the art is an instrument of magic.
Cult value, which you would've seen throughout much of
human history in the use of what we
would now consider to be art objects within ritual practices, have to do with
mystery.
The cult object
has a mysterious character to
it, right?
It is endowed
with the powers of magic.
And even veni mean says of genius.
This is opposed to exhibition value, which Benjamin says is not based on
ritual, but rather based on politics.
With exhibition value, the art is meant to be viewed by the
masses.
Its instrumental
character as a magical object that has this component of mystery is
eliminated or at least is decreased.
And although Benjamin mean doesn't
go into detail on this, I think you see a rise in exhibition
value, arguably with the rise of secular settings for art, including
museums over the past
couple
hundred years.
Benjamin says that
exhibition value reaches its apotheosis in photography and film.
He says they're the most serviceable exemplifications of this new
function, the new artistic
function which he associates with exhibition value.
He thinks that we've gone from being a society that had a complete faith
in the artwork as an object of cult value, to now emphasizing almost
exclusively exhibition value, and that photography and film are particularly
well equipped for exhibition value.
But even as exhibition value has come to take the place of the cult value of art,
which by any means sees as having been its original role, he doesn't think that
cult value has disappeared completely.
He suggests that it has retrenched into the human countenance.
He says it's no accident that the portrait was the focal point of
early photography, especially the cult of remembrance of loved ones,
whether through portraits
of those living, or as you may
know from some deep
dives into 19th century photography, portraits of dead people were
actually very popular as well.
He thinks that this cult of remembrance of loved ones is a last refuge
for the cult value of the picture.
I wanna turn now to a very different kind of portrait or human countenance
that comes up in this essay,
which is Benjamin's description
of the actor and how the film actor is different from the stage
actor.
For Benjamin, the film
actor is unique in the sense that they are operating with
their whole living person, right?
They're putting their body, their voice,
all of their capacities
for expressivity into their acting for the film.
But they have to actually forego the aura because they know that
they're not acting for an audience.
They know that
there is no physical
perception of a distance between them and the audience, right?
It's not like a real relation that is happening in real
time.
And their performance
is therefore absent from the audience.
They're acting for a camera.
I'm not an actor right now.
I am a college professor giving a lecture, but I am indeed talking to a camera.
So arguably
some of what Benjamin is saying
can apply to myself too, which is a little bit strange and even
more alienating when he already
says that the film actor
experiences this kind of alienation or estrangement from
their own countenance.
He says for the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents
himself to the public before the camera rather than representing someone else.
So in addition to being
physically absent from the audience and really
acting towards the camera, even if there are other people around, when a film
is being shot, ultimately the actor is acting for the camera, there's also this
sense for bein in the quote that I just read, that the film actor is different
from the stage actor because they are ultimately representing themselves, as
opposed to the stage actor
who is embodying the role of another person.
He thinks that the humanity of the actor is present in a film actor in a
way that it's not for the stage actor, such that the film actor comes to be a
star.
The cult of personality
develops around them, and they don't disappear into the character
in the way that a stage actor does.
Even as there's this shriveling of the aura, there's an artificial buildup
of the personality outside the studio.
Benjamin says, the cult of the movie star preserves not the unique aura of the
person, but the spell of the personality, the phony spell of a commodity.
And keep in mind here that, for Benjamin also, there's this loss of
control for the film actor because the film actor, by virtue of acting
for a camera, is also giving their performance over to post-production
where their performance can be edited, chopped up and rendered differently
than the actor originally had in mind.
And so the stage actor, while simultaneously disappearing into the
character, also has greater agency over their performance because they are
able to craft it on stage and directly have that be present to the audience.
I was gonna say, speak to the audience, but oftentimes that'll, that's
only true when they're
breaking the fourth wall.
Whereas the film actor on the other hand, is not only acting for the
camera, but is acting in such a way that they're not gonna have creative control
over how their performance is edited.
And the audience, by
contrast, Benjamin thinks, identifies
with the actor.
Sure, at least it seems to be that way.
But ultimately the audience is identifying with the camera.
The audience is in the position of the camera, and bein thinks that this is
fundamentally antithetical to cult value.
This is really a
loss of aura similar to
the complete loss of mystery that you have when we move to exhibition value.
Now, I started the video by talking
about how Benjamin thinks that
the changes in the conditions of production have wrought changes in
art and in our perception of art.
And I wanna talk about that perceptual aspect now.
For Benjamin, we're experiencing a move with the mechanical reproducibility of
art away from contemplative immersion in artworks and towards a reception
of art in what he calls distraction or
in German, Zerstreuung.
And this
distraction, Benjamin thinks is
particularly notable when it comes to film.
Now this is one of those
things about Benjamin's essay, which
of course we need to be careful about anachronisms here, but it's hard to
read this part of his essay and not be shocked that he was writing about
receptionist state of distraction
well before many of us were actually watching films within the comfort of
our own home, while also scrolling social media at the same time and like
doing this double screen type of thing.
I think the distraction that Benjamin is talking
about is nothing compared
to what we're experiencing
today, but Benjamin thinks that
reception at a state of distraction is
increasingly noticeable
in all fields of art.
but that it finds in the film it's true means of exercise.
When you are at the movies, you don't have to concentrate your attention
because things are coming at you, and so you can be in this position of the
reception in a state of distraction.
And this mode of distraction, which finds its culmination in film, is
opposed to the model of concentration and
contemplation, which Benjamin associates
with painting.
People have different interpretations on to what extent bein sees a
liberatory power in the state of
distraction.
It's similar
with the aura.
He can come off as curmudgeonly
about the loss of distraction, or, sorry, the rise of distraction and the loss of
contemplation.
But there's
also a case to be made that he thinks that this reception and distraction is going to
ultimately help democratize
and access to art and overcome fascism.
Because in the background of this essay, and this is where I wanna
turn for a final theme, is Benjamin's profound concern and very well
justified concern that fascism is
aestheticizing politics.
And that is creating
major dangers both for art and for politics.
Beamin himself was chased out of his homeland by the Nazis and ended up
dying by suicide while trying to escape
them. He, like many of the
Frankfurt school members of which he was a part, was
Jewish.
And as Beni mean
is writing this, that specter of fascism and it's aestheticization of
politics is looming in the background.
And he says that there's a real danger when we aestheticize politics.
Again, this is an aspect of the essay that seems really
prescient almost a hundred
years later.
If you think about a lot of the video games or TV shows and movies
that we're watching nowadays that are valorizing all kinds of
problematic political
positions and aesthetic them.
And Benjamin says that
in response to this increasing aestheticization of politics,
we need to politicize art.
And so that's the clarion call on which he ends this essay rather than seeing
aesthetics and politics as two separate domains, which he thinks is impossible.
Once you have the conditions of reproducibility, he
thinks that art loses its
autonomy.
Then the response
that he thinks is the most just response is to politicize art.
I mentioned
earlier that Benjamin
is influenced by Marxist theory and identified as well as a communist, and
he says that the situation of politics is one that fascism is rendering aesthetic.
Communism responds by politicizing art.