Walter Benjamin and Art (review)

This volume of thirteen essays presents reevaluations of Walter Benjamin's short but influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Although the essay was written in the 1930s, it was not published in English until 1969 (in Illuminations, translated by Hannah Arendt). Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) held that art should be viewed as a form of production that was directly influenced by the history of technological development, rather than as a closed aesthetic category of discourse. Furthermore, "art" was to be understood in its broadest sense, as a kind of techne. Benjamin was interested in the early-twentieth-century mass-culture industries of film and photography, rather than established fine-art mediums such as painting, hoping that new image technologies would jolt human perceptions into understanding the conditions of modern life. A key concept here was the loss of "aura" when we encounter artifacts dissociated from any fabric of tradition. Equally, his critical philosophy of history aimed to seize on those fragments of the past that appeared as moments of danger for the present, most notably in his unfinished anthology The Arcades Project (1927–40), an amalgamation of sources relating to the nineteenth-century Parisian shopping arcades that were to be the location of emerging consumerism.

Indeed, one of the common threads in Walter Benjamin and Art is the reception history of Benjamin's ideas through translation. Diarmud Costello, focusing on the adoption of the essay on mechanical reproduction among Anglophone critical theorists, argues that the very familiarity of this work since the 1980s has produced a distorted version of the idea of "loss of aura" that serves mainly to support a by-now congealed postmodernist orthodoxy, whereas what is needed is a direct reengagement with the full complexity and ethical force of Benjamin's writings. Equally, the appearance of this volume under review, part of a projected series, can be seen as part of a new revival of interest stimulated by the long-awaited translation of The Arcades Project. One of the cotranslators on that project, Howard Eiland, engages here with another key topic, the effect of "distraction" in mass culture. The entertainment industry is accused of providing a diet of illusory spectacle to the distracted individual, who has been overcome by the fragmentation of time, space, and causality in his modern technological existence. However, Benjamin hoped that film, with its equally fragmented techniques of shooting and editing, would alert its audience to recognize the truth of their own reality in a critical way. In a more general mode, Fabrizio Desideri considers our "pathological oscillation" between love and fear of technology. In "Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious," Detlef Mertens explores Benjamin's debt to Sigfried Giedions's thesis that architectural and other technical forms offered a view into the "subconscious of the epoch" manifested in the material world itself. Other contributors address technological aspects of art not explored by Benjamin: for example, Rajeev S. Patke writes on the recorded music industry and Krzysztof Ziarek on interactive digital technology.

Many scholars of the early twentieth century such as Giedion helped to pioneer new critical approaches on the relationship of technology and lived experience, and readers of Technology and Culture will recall Pamela O. Long's recent essay (January 2005) that celebrated the 1929 establishment of the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in France under Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Benjamin's influence remains strong, particularly within the disciplines of philosophy, history, aesthetics, and cultural theory. The strength of this book is that it gives a sense of the direction of current Benjamin scholarship from within those disciplines, expressed in terms that are accessible to the general academic reader. As almost all the contributors themselves demand, however, readers should return to the fervent, compressed, and suggestive statements of Benjamin himself, now so well-served in English translation.