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The Art of Walter Benjamin
In an Age of Political Misinformation
Preface
In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty says: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." Alice objects that the question is, “whether you can make words mean so many different things." Humpty Dumpty replies that the question is “which is to be master — that's all." We know that political power often defines the effective meaning of words.
Essentially summarizing the core practice of deconstructive criticism, our purpose is to locate hidden flaws, ambiguities, and paradoxes of which the author is probably unaware. Derrida’s method of deconstruction was to look past the irony and ambiguity to the layer that genuinely threatens to collapse that system. We will follow that model here.
In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin divides art along two separate modalities. The bourgeois pre-Marxist conception, which he defines as a cult object, and the post-revolutionary art that Marxism limits to an effective tool for political indoctrination. Discussing film, which he privileges over other media, Benjamin explains that all we can expect of art is an accurate representation of reality.For him, a genuine work of art is that which is created by a committee of the working class to instruct the masses. But this reduction of art to political agitation conflicts with historical expectations of art as our highest cultural achievement. Nor is Benjamin’s degradation of art to cult object anything other than a failure to understand the nature of art.We shall return to this later.
Benjamin wrongly rejects aesthetics as a bourgeois cult. This paper defines aesthetics as the mechanical; aspect of grammar and vocabulary in non-verbal languages, expressing that which is lost when translated into words.
Deconstructingstrategy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Students approach Walter Benjamin's famous essay with expectations of greatness, when in fact they face the confusion of pernicious misdirection. Benjamin is such a poet of prose, his writing is so lyrical and expansive that it beguiles us and dampens our critical faculties.In this seduction we end up believing politically inspired statements that otherwise would raise Red Flags. Every now and then, a salient point emerges from the foliage of distractions, but one must be up on their toes to capture that dance of words. Walter Benjamin was neither delusional nor dishonest. He belonged to another category altogether: the fervent political acolyte. This essay is based on observations that Benjamin, in his cultural analysis, shaped his thoughts to fit the procrustean bed of his political beliefs.
Benjamin’s “Mechanical Reproduction” was not what we expect of impartial scholarship but was instead a work of Marxist agitprop that strayed from the truth and then ignored it altogether. In case some innocent scholars question this assertion, we should note that Benjamin’s writing is archived on marxist.org (1).
The Strategy
Benjamin was no bull in a china shop when he promoted Marxist canon; he often hid the quiet part in a fog of distracting details.For example, the following sentences reveal their meaning only after distilling the essence."Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art."Distilled, this yields the statement “a representation of reality is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art."
To read Benjamin we need to understand the strategies by which he aims to confuse us into accepting the unacceptable.For example the second paragraph only makes sense if we dispense with the extraneous central part, which leaves us with “the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power… or the art of a classless society… brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.”
Following "the art of the proletariat or classless society", Benjamin floods the zone by linking such “future art” to irrelevancies such as superstructures and economy. Here these words mean nothing. Benjamin seeks to exhaust our critical thinking, so that we eventually give up and drink the purple cool-aid of the last sentence, one we would otherwise reject: brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.”
Since one cannot decode meaningless sentences, trying to do so confuses the reader who assumes those words are important. This leads us to exhaust our energy trying to decipher the undecipherable.Eventually one gets tired of trying, surrenders, moves on to the next sentence and accepts the unacceptable they would otherwise protest.Marxist sympathizers are especially prone to fall into this trap, believing we all are at fault for not understanding Benjamin's brilliant ideas.
We are warned that most commentaries on Benjamin praise him as a brilliant social critic, an early Marshall McLuhan, who accurately predicted how society would experience art in the future.Garage Publishing and Ad Marginem Press write that “Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) was a German philosopher, theoretician of culture, literary critic, writer and translator." "He is one of the most influential cultural philosophers of the 20th Century. His essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction remains one of the central texts in understanding the role of art within an industrial society. (2) Caveat Emptor.
Some complain that students now ignore Benjamin, which prompts an inquiry into the reasons why. There lives art theory that is built on a lack of logic, a failure of common sense so obviously questionable, that we are at a loss to explain why our brightest minds among top tier scholars did not stand up and point out that his article is political propaganda.. That, by itself, would not be a real problem until we realize that history simply refused to cooperate with Benjamin's expectations of a socialist paradise
A decisive deconstruction
Benjamin defines the value of what he describes as bourgeois art, not on any linguistic, spiritual, or other intrinsic quality, but on its uniqueness; a uniqueness that gives it its marketing value within today’s bourgeois cult of art appreciation. Or as he put it: “the most profane cult of beauty.”In his words, "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of art's authenticity... the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the work loses its authority”. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
Contrary to Benjamin’s thesis, one would think that uniqueness is not the arbiter of authority.Art is created as an exercise in non-verbal language, another point we’ll return to later.Then the art acquires different meaning depending on circumstance.For example, the swastika’s meaning differs for the oppressor and the oppressed, especially when reproduced. It then has very real “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” and this presence increases in power and effect the more the symbol is reproduced.A single swastika in a Nazi’s hand means less than the multitudinous incarnadine flags at the Nuremberg rally. The Leni Riefenstahl film, Der Sieg des Glaubens, (TriumphoftheWill), was made at this rally, and the film’s reception depends on one’s political affiliation. In either case there was no doubt as to that film’s presence through reproduction, or “its unique existence (even when reproduced) at the place where it happens to be.”
Core Argument
In “Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin’s core argument was
“that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”.
Had Benjamin written “the aura of a cult object” he would have been partially right. Instead he wrote “the aura of a work of art” and was completely wrong. What withered in the age of mechanical reproduction was Benjamin’s argument, because Johannes Gutenberg stood up to disagree. The aura of art is not like the aura of a cult object. Books are made by mechanical reproduction, yet printed words and images are appreciated through multiple reproductions over centuries.
We have always sought original content in art, not the uniqueness of cult objects. Such uniqueness is the quest of collectors of first editions and the like. Art lovers appreciate art for what the works say. For example, Munch's The Scream is known primarily from mechanical reproduction (since few have seen the original), yet the image remains haunting, just as haunting as any Raven perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door. Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” (3)That was painting and poetry, followed by music below.
Benjamin confuses art with the cult objects that create the appearance of a distance, however close the object may be. That appearance emanates from the cult object's singular existence in time and space, “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. Benjamin’s concept is more specific and structural than being about aesthetic power or effect. He is saying aura involves uniqueness, authenticity, historical situatedness, unrepeatable presence, “here and now” and a relation of distance between viewer and object. He is saying something like original artworks are embedded in a singular historical existence that cannot be detached from their situation.
Translated into contemporary language, Benjamin says that what we seek in a painting, poem, or song is the original manuscript, canvas, or paper on which the lyrics and notes were written. Should we hear Beethoven's 5th symphony performed from printed reproduction rather than the musician’s handwritten notes, we would find nothing of interest in the music itself.That was painting and poetry, followed by music below.
Benjamin confuses art with the cult objects that create the appearance of a distance, however close the object may be. That appearance emanates from the cult object's singular existence in time and space, ?its unique existence at the place where it happens to be?. Benjamin?s concept is more specific and structural than being about aesthetic power or effect. He is saying aura involves uniqueness, authenticity, historical situatedness, unrepeatable presence, ?here and now? and a relation of distance between viewer and object. He is saying something like original artworks are embedded in a singular historical existence that cannot be detached from their situation.
Benjamin tells us, translated into contemporary language, that what we seek in a painting, poem, or song is the original manuscript, canvas, or paper on which the lyrics and notes were written. Should we hear Beethoven's 5th symphony performed from printed reproduction rather than the musician?s handwritten notes, we would find nothing of interest in the music itself.
This is nonsense. No artist would agree with that. Nor do artists aim for “appearance of a distance, however close the object may be”. When making art, the artist tries to put the audience closer to the work, so that they understand it no matter how far away from it they are. When art becomes a cult object, it ceases to be art. Benjamin’s assertions follow Marxist doctrine that denies a personal vision, since Marx wrote that history is created by the masses.Therefore, art must be seen as a cult object that manipulates masses.Except that art is no such thing. Benjamin suffers a political blind spot that makes him unable to comprehend and therefore to comment on art, even as he himself was a lyrical writer.
Artists do not create work seeking a “unique appearance of a distance, however close the object may be.” Nor do artists create art to make cult objects whose uniqueness gives the work its authority.It is the author's vision that give the work author"ity". When a work of art such as Mona Lisa becomes a cult object, it loses the artist’s intended meaning and is repurposed for quasi-religious or political ends. It is obvious that Benjamin only understands art as such a cult object, like a signed Beatles album, which is often handled with quasi-religious reverence, including claims about authenticity and provenance that mirror religious veneration. But even his description of cult objects is not strictly accurate, as recordings of John Lennon or Vladimir Lenin's voice have an aura that remains no matter how often that recording is reproduced and played.
Most artists will agree that art does have an aura, a glow. This is a psychological experience of awe, felt when we face intellectual statements written in a sensory vocabulary. Generally, we know intellectual statements by the verbal or written form decoded by logic and grammar. It is this transposition of mental faculties from intellectual statements to sensory comprehension that give non-verbal languages such an attraction as to seem magical. On the other hand, when we see art such as the Mona Lisa as a cult object, we no longer read the painting objectively but superficially, we refer to what others have told us about it, and are directed to imagine its place within a quasi-religious system of cultural authority. This is not aesthetics, not the language of art, but the language of control, which is the purpose of all cults.
Benjamin’s indoctrination insists on art after the "proletariat's assumption of power" as social realism. We read that all we can expect of art are bare facts, an accurate rendition of reality, skill in copying the material world. The essence of art is supposedly pictorial reproduction. This assumes we all see alike, that our vision and thinking are similar if not homogenous. Were this true, we would not praise those who see the world in a grain of sand, when most of us see but sand. In fact, art consists of hinting there is more to life than the obvious.
Instead, we learn the only meaningful reality consists of facts that become evident when mechanical reproduction stamps out bourgeois decadence. Benjamin is a lyrical writer able to capture our hearts; unfortunately, in this essay he sublimates his literary gifts to a political theology. A Marxist reading of history adds to our political awareness; history is shaped by economics, conflict, and class struggle, among other variables. And yet a material dialectic is not the sole way to describe the body politic.
In a Marxist economic model, one sets aside self-interest for the common good, giving according to one’s ability, receiving according to one’s need. This beautiful idea explains why Communism attracted so many converts in the Western world, among those horrified by the abuses of capitalism. Unfortunately, communists ruined the world for Communism. The rich and powerful always had greater needs than the poor and the weak. Photographer Boris Spasso, whose work commented on labor and privilege in the Soviet Union, illustrates this in a night time photo of a Moscow street facing the Kremlin. In the foreground we see a filthy heavyset working-class woman on her hands and knees, laying down bricks to build a road. Behind her there is a limousine with an open door, from which steps out in high heels a wealthy woman wearing a fur coat. She is the wife of a member of the male-dominated Politburo, the ruling echelon of the Soviet Union. Yet although aware of such socialist inequalities, experts certify Walter Benjamin’s text as an indispensable revolutionary prognosis. That makes it important for us to get into the weeds.
Francis Naumann is the canonical Duchamp scholar, as Marcel Duchamp’s confidant, and biographer. He wrote extensively on Duchamp over decades, so we defer to him writing that Duchamp and Benjamin met on at least one occasion, in a café in Paris a year after Benjamin’s essay was published in 1935. Yet we would reject Naumann’s assumption that it is doubtful the readymade would have been one of the issues they discussed, when Benjamin’s 1935 title so aptly describes Duchamp’s 1913 factory-made found objects. The links between Benjamin’s title and Duchamp’s readymades are so obvious, along with their common disdain for authorship, that they were unlikely to ignore the subject. Francis Naumann’s assumptions should not be read with an innocent eye. Naumann accepts Benjamin’s essay at face value, calling it “the most penetrating analysis on the way in which society will come to envision the concept of originality in a work of art.” He should know better; by this time history had not been kind to Walter Benjamin, just as Benjamin had been unkind to facts, bending them left and right to fit the procrustean bed of orthodox Marxism.
Who was Walter Benjamin?
Benjamin’s literary talent and virtuosity reveal a genius working in a traditional field of writing, even as Mechanical Reproduction opens with a quote by Paul Valéry suggesting we should expect something more radical than standard text. Valery says new technologies transform culture so much that it may bring about an amazing change in our very notion of art. It came to be that Benjamin’s paper presents a materialistic philosophy rejecting spiritual and individual values. He defines art as nothing but a sophisticated form of political propaganda. An opposite reading from psychology sees art as an activity driven by an instinct (4), relatively unaffected by any specific technology. The art of our stone-age ancestors does not much differ in intent from that of contemporary artist Anish Kapoor. Technology may change but creative activity remains an ancient algorithm, an instinctive behavior born in the dawn of humanity millions of years ago. Its effect is to expand human consciousness and build the structure of behavior known as culture. But now let us try to understand understand Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin was no beauty, he was an awkward man. He was impractical, incapable of lighting a fire or opening a window, seemingly a Communist who needed servants. Hannah Arendt writes of him “With a precision suggesting a sleepwalker his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very centre of misfortune”. For example to escape the bombing of Paris he so feared, he had moved to the outlying districts of the city and unwittingly ended up in a small village that was one of the first to be destroyed. Benjamin had not realized this apparently insignificant place was at the centre of an important rail network, and therefore liable to be e bombed. (5) It is no wonder that he was perhaps incapable of having a relationship and when he tried, it was a disaster. (6)
FromGarage Publishing we learn that “In the winter of 1926-27, Benjamin spent two months in Moscow, where he kept a detailed diary that served as the basis for a series of essays about Moscow and Russian culture. His brief visit was instigated by his infatuation with Asia Lacis, a Latvian actress and communist whom he had met on the island of Capri at the beginning of the 1920s. Benjamin’s close friend and the first publisher of the Moscow diary, Gershom Scholem, regards the story of this failed romance to be ‘the most personal, fully and mercilessly sincere document telling us about a very important period in the life of Benjamin.’’(7)
For a poetic writer like Benjamin, whose passionate literature we hold in highest esteem, his art (as in Arcades) was a practice of self-expansion, reaching the highest spiritual development, born of the creative unconscious depths of the individual.
Benjamin’stalent shows best in Passagenwerk or Arcades Project, an unfinished work written between 1927 and 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of 19th century Paris, many scholars consider Arcades might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, but was never completed due to his suicide. This extract is from his notes on n Marseilles;
“the yellow-studded maw of a seal with salt water running out between the teeth. When this gullet opens to catch the black and brown proletarian bodies thrown to it by ship’s companies according to their timetables, it exhales a stink of oil, urine, and printer’s ink. This comes from the tartar baking hard on the massivejnewspaper kiosks, lavatories, and oyster stalls. The harbour people are a bacillus culture, the porters and whores products of decomposition with a resemblance to human beings. But the palate itself is pink, which is the colour of shame here, of poverty. Hunchbacks wear it, and beggarwomen. And the discoloured women of rue Bouterie are given their only tint by the sole pieces of clothing they wear: pink shifts.”
Benjamin Political
“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. 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 the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion off art.”
Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931
Le Conquete de l’ubiquite
Introduction to Benjamin’s essay.
Benjamin has been praised as a social scientist but ironically, where we thought his article was research like today's academic scholarship, it quickly reveals itself as political indoctrination. Neil Davidson writes that as an intellectual communist Benjamin was versed “in the classical Marxist writings of Karl Marx, Frederich Engels, their contemporaries, and then Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa a Luxemburg.”(8) The irony is that Marxism was built on the writings of these people, while Marxist tenets repudiate the agency or even the existence of such individuals. Marx denied such agency acording to his theory of history consisting of economic determinism, in which we lack ‘free will’, as each individual is but the tool of economic forces. (9)
In this article we find a political message that twists truth to fit policy. History reminds us that communists saw truth and accuracy as useful when convenient, to be ignored otherwise. We cannot read Benjamin innocently when he is obviously writing agitprop without concern for accuracy. As we see after a moment of reflection, the redactions, contradictions, and leaps of faith are obvious.
A few years later Benjamin may have changed his views about much contained in this essay, according to one of his last works, “On the Concept of History”, which seemingly doubts Karl Marx's claims to scientific objectivity. “Concept of History” appears to reject the past as a continuum of progress and suggests historical materialism is a quasi-religious fraud. But that comes later. Mechanical Reproduction is based on dialectic materialism, denying creativity in favor of a data-driven art degraded to political education. Since then science has shown that beauty and its complex differentiations are crucial for mental health, instead of being a disposable bourgeois deca-dance. And what a dance it is! Paul Dirac says that when he finds beauty in his equations he knows he’s on the right path to progress, and Einstein agreed. Few ever said that when they found ugliness in their work they knew they were on the path of progress.
As an aside, Montreal’s Sealan Twerdy suggests Benjamin’s essay should be titled “Technological Reproductability” instead of “Mechanical l Reproduction”(10) , following canonical Benjamin scholars like Princeton's Michael Jennings. (German: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) While the context is accurate, “Technical Reproduction”, got more “likes” on Facebook, being easier to pronounce. But “Mechanical Reproduction” was carved in stone ages ago, and won’t wear away anytime soon.
The art of a unique individual
Moscow doesn’t believe in tears, nor in the individual with their feelings and private thoughts; supposedly the strength of socialism lies in the masses. A major premise of Benjamin’s essay therefore denies value to individual artists. The aura of the work of art is further described in chapter four of Mechanical Reproduction as the mythical bourgeois value of the uniqueness of an ‘authentic’ work of art” which mechanical reproduction destroys.
Photography is given as an example. “The status of a work of art will no longer depend on a parasitic ritual of authorship. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense”. Here we read how Marxism denies any value to the creative individual, ironic when Benjamin's reputation is founded on the lyrical text.
This “parasitic ritual of authorship” means that no individual is better than another according to egalitarian socialism. But now we remember that history has been unkind to Benjamin. He should have known better; limited edition prints sold for a premium even during the Renaissance.
In 1985, fifty-two years after Benjamin wrote that article, an authentic Ansel Adams print sold for $722,000 because of the limited edition printed by this major artist. Original photographs by Ansel Adams are defined as photographs he printed from the negatives that he shot and developed. In Oct. 2024, Sotheby’s auction house sold a collection of images by the legendary landscape photographer for $4,567,680. The work achieved such high prices based on the creative aesthetics of Ansel Adam’s unique vision that found such beauty in a grain sand.
The camera’s mechanical parts standardize photography, but there is still plenty of room for the artist's choices, such as the visual grammar of frame composition, color, tone, brightness, and angle of view. Although Benjamin mentions printing and lithography, he discounts the aesthetic factors, the unique visual language, beyond functionality that actually created the work’s value. Esthetics were bourgeois, so of no interest to him. However, in the field of non-verbal languages, aesthetics consist of the grammar and vocabulary of art, how the artist uses that non-verbal language. Ignoring such facts is that blind spot which foretells Benjamin’s eventuall misfortune.
A criterion of verifiability
“The criterion we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements is the criterion of verifiability”, so writes Oxford’s A.J. Ayers, in a study of language, truth, and logic. “We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, they know how to verify the proposition it purports to o express”(11) . Georgy Pyatakov, who was twice expelled from the Party and eventually shot, wrote that a true Bolshevik is “ready to believe [not just assert] that black was white and white was black, if the Party required it,” In Orwell’s book 1984, O’Brien proclaims this very doctrine - two plus two is really five if the Party says it is - which Orwell calls “collective solipsism.” (12) No one considered how self-interest and greed makes corruption inevitable, when members follow the party line.
PaulValéry’s preface contains the seeds of it’s own demise when he writes of Marx’s prognostic critique, which didn’t turn out like that. Marx described capitalism exploiting the proletariat with increasing intensity, eventually forcing a global working class revolution where they would cast off their chains, take over the means of production, and abolish capitalism itself. This is what Nikita Khrushchev meant in 1960, when he took off his shoe at the United Nations and pounded it on the table yelling “We will bury you.” The Russian words  actually translate as “we will attend your funeral”. That didn’t work out as Marx expected. By the time Khrushchev finished pounding the table, or more precisely by the end of the Industrial Revolution, workers had formed unions that eventually raised wages and created a thriving middle class out of the impoverished proletariat. Union pension funds were invested on the stock market, allowing workers to become owners of the means of production. The evils of capitalism persisted, but somewhat mitigated, though the future i uncertain.
We return to Benjamin’s predictions of how workers, after the global revolution, would do away with art’s decadence. Marcel Duchamp himself had said in a 1968 BBC interview that art was discredited, so we should get rid of it like some had done with religion. (13) Walter Benjamin, who believed art was useful as propaganda, put it differently:
The art of the proletariat after its assumption of power… or the art of a classless society… brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. Fascism expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.
Since tthe Nazis at the time were using powerful graphics to represent their fascist movement, Benjamin conflated art and propaganda to justify that sentence. Paradoxically, he wrote at the end of his paper that “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” This sounds like an irrational contradiction, since he had just complained that the Nazis had made art political. Of course this can be resolved by Benjamin’s idea that aesthetics are “the cult of beauty” discarded in communism. "The work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.” If the artistic function becomes incidental, the work is no longer art
In chapter 5 and onwards, Benjamin formulates a doubtful assertion, a dual explanation of art’s function. On one side a quasi-religious ritual in which the art is partly hidden as a cult object. On the other side the exhibition of art in order to reach the masses, which makes art political. This is where he writes that exhibition, through reproduction in order to reach the masses, depletes art of its aura. This seems more fictional than realistic, since the absolutism of his views can easily be doubted, contradicted, and critiqued. As for the nature of art in our time, creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery still retain some importance. Today even an artist’s shit now sells for nearly a million dollars.
In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of artist's shit titled Merde d’Artiste. Each can was numbered on the lid, from 001 to 090 and sold for $37.U.S. The can in the Tate Gallery's collection was number 004. The cans sell today for upwards of $120,000, while Artsy has a listing of $989,000. Ninety cans of Merde d’Artiste is mechanical reproduction with a vengeance, although urban myth says the cans contain plaster of Paris.
As for discarding the concept of genius, documentation attests to child prodigies such as Mozart, who toured Europe playing piano at age seven, an early Michael Jackson. The "genius" label includes exceptional adults with unmatched achievements who win Nobel Prizes. In the meantime, the spiritual values awakened by mystery give life meaning; a psychological feature that cannot be underrated. Our experience of beauty is central to the way we understand our reality physically, psychologically, and spiritually.” When psychology speaks of art therapy, the opposite is also true. Rejecting aesthetics and spiritual values degrades mental health, lowers morale as well as weakens the immune system, bleeds one’s motivation, degrades character, and likely played a large role in Benjamin’s suicide.
Through chapters 5 onward, Benjamin writes about film, which to him represents the final form of art that overrides all other images by being the most realistic.
“For contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter since it offers… a reality which is free of all personal bias.”
Today we expect more from art than the obvious. Other corrections raise their heads; there is no such thing as freedom from personal bias. Sarah Lewis at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, found that even at the most basic level of film, digital sensors, and camera lighting, the parameters are optimized for racial bias according to the skin color of the person in front of the lens.(14) The composition and the timing are also subject to cultural bias; for example in a culture with a high degree of respect for the elderly, the lens may linger on them longer than otherwise. Some cultural biases are unconscious. In the early days of Soviet Russia, the respect for literacy was so strong that if a political film was unsuccessful, the writer was executed by a firing squad while the director and actors were not held accountable.
When art is solely propaganda, large groups need to harmonize their understanding of the content of a film. “Mechanical reproduction changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie.” At that time, Chaplin films were seen as a champion of “the little man”. Ironically, in his private life, Charlie Chaplin, who was a talented actor, was described by fellow actor Marlon Brando(15) and by his own son (16) as an unbearable narcissist. Marlon Brando threatened to kick him off a film set for repeated cruelty by Chaplin to his own son. Rather the opposite of the selfless Bolshevik.
Benjamin writes that viewing a painting is a personal affair; therefore with a painting “there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception”. For communists the mass’ reaction is to be controlled; the party informs, the masses listen, in “the adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality.” A film better lends itself to indoctrination since it is seen by large groups at the same time in a state of collective consciousness. “Since, moreover, (film is meant to distract the viewer) ...the most difficult and most important (task is to) mobilize the masses.” Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is... symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background ... by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.
Benjamin explains further; “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.” Here we see the disapproval of personal judgment and praise for collective response. Benjamin goes on “ Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’”(17)
Benjamin concludes his essay by writing (as noted earlier) “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” “The work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.” If the artistic function is incidental then the work is no longer art, it is illustration. By the end of his paper Benjamin’s argument reveals the contradictions at its core. It doesn’t help that 90 years later, with television, internet, social media and cellphones, Benjamin’s deep dive into film, as the most important medium for public indoctrination of the masses, was obviously a dead end. Contrary to the uncritical praise Benjamin received for nine decades, his essay did not remain and was not a central text in understanding the role of art in contemporary society.
Ways of Seeing
John Berger’s “ Ways of Seeing” is a masterly lesson in deconstruction, but he acknowledges a strong debt to Benjamin’s view of painting. Which also means that Berger’s ideas are questionable when they lean on Benjamin’s writing. For example, Berger shares the fallacy that oil painting exists to mirror the wealth of the rich but now photography does a better job so we have no need for painting anymore. He echoes Walter Benjamin and Marcel Duchamp in writing that painting is dead. The science of linguistics, on the other hand, tells us that the death of painting is an unrealistic expectation. Painting is a visual language on par with literature; expressing that which cannot be put in words. As visual language has been with us since the dawn of history, it is unlikely to die anytime soon.
Death of Walter Benjamin
In Mechanical Reproduction we find beliefs that seem incredible without a Marxist indoctrination. Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler was a longtime communist who left the party disillusioned. In ‘The God That Failed’ and ‘The Invisible Writing’, Koestler described the logical contradictions and sacrificium intellectus that communist writers suffered.(18) The resulting emotional damage may well explain Benjamin's catastrophic failure of morale, which can happen to Communists when they are left alone for too long. This failure of morale probably led to his subsequent suicide in a moment of crisis.
Arthur Koestler wrote in “The Invisible Writing” of Benjamin's death in Spain during the 1940s. “Just before we left, I ran into an old friend, the German writer Walter Benjamin. He was making preparations for his own escape to England. He has thirty tablets of a morphia-compound, which he intended to swallow if caught: he said they were enough to kill a horse, and gave me half the tablets, just in case. The day after the final refusal of my visa, I learned that Walter Benjamin, having managed to cross the Pyrenees, had been arrested on the Spanish side, and threatened with being sent back to France. The next morning the Spanish gendarmes had changed their mind, but by that time Benjamin had swallowed his remaining half of the pills and was dead.” (19)
FOOTNOTE
1  Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Schocken/Random House, ed. by Hannah Arendt, marxist.org/
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
2 Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin, Garage Press
https://garagemca.org/en/programs/publishing/walter-benjamin-moscow-diary
3 Edgar Allan Poe, TheRaven.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven
4 Dennis Dutton'sA Darwinian Theory of Beauty Ted Talk, youtube
https://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty
5 Giorgio van Straten, ‘In Search of Lost Books’, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, Pushkin Press 2018.
6 Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin, Garage Press
https://garagemca.org/en/programs/publishing/walter-benjamin-moscow-diary
7 ditto
8 Neil Davidson, Walter Benjamin and the classical Marxist tradition,International Socialism, issue 121, Jan.2009,
https://isj.org.uk/walter-benjamin-and-the-classical-marxist-tradition/
9 Peter G. Stillman, The Myth of Marx’s Economic Determinism, 2005
https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/peter-stillman/article.htm
10 Joseph Henry, “All Awareness Becomes Base”: Jens Hoffmann’s Reduction of The Arcades Project, MOMUS
http://momus.ca/awareness-becomes-base-jens-hoffmanns-reduction-arcades-project/
11 A.J.Ayers, Language, Truth and Logic, p48, Pelican Books.
12 Saul Morson, The house is on fire! On the hidden horrors of Soviet life. The new Criterion. 22016.
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Scènes_de_la_vie_future
13 Joan Bakewell in conversation with Marcel Duchamp, Late Night Line-Up, BBC ARTS, 1968.
https://youtu.be/Zo3qoyVk0GU
14 Sarah Lewis,The racial bias built into photography, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Adanced Stidy, 2019
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2019-vision-and-justice-convening
15 Marlon Brando, The Contender, the story of Marlon Brando,
https://www.amazon.ca/Contender-Story-Marlon-Brando/dp/006242764
16 Michael Chaplin, I Couldn't Smoke the Grass On My Father's Lawn,
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9323656
17 Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future, Paris, Mercure de France, 1930, p. 52
;http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Scènes_de_la_vie_future6
18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_of_the_intellect
19 Arthur Koestler, p421, The Invisible Writing, Hamish, Hamilton & Collins
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