The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (review)

In my own field of teaching and research, the work of Walter Benjamin is so widely referenced that it could be said he has attained the status of "patron saint of visual studies," as characterized by James Elkins in 2003. Indeed, most students in art, design, and cultural history encounter Benjamin's work through reading the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"—launched on Anglophone readers in the volume titled Illuminations(Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harry Zohn, trans.) in 1968. By contrast, this volume presents us (under a different title) with a different working of the same argument that was not translated into English until the beginning of this century (in Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., 2002). In Benjamin's extended writing and rewriting of this text between 1935 and 1939, this was his second and most expanded version. Here, his hope that the development of techniques of mass communication such as film would result in new, critical, and liberated modes of consciousness was most fully explained and enunciated: "The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus. . . . Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories, seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world" ("The Work of Art," part 16, p. 37).

The title essay in this book is followed by a selection of other thematically grouped writings on many aspects of the relationship between technology, media, and the human sensorium, under titles such as "The Telephone," "Chambermaids," "Romances of the Past Century," or "Mickey Mouse." The book also brings together several essays that are well-known but not previously printed together. For example, the first part includes both the title essay on the work of art, and also "The Author as Producer," while part 4 includes "News about Flowers" and "Little History of Photography." In addition, the editors have expanded each text with generous notes and have written an introductory essay to each section. In this way, the reader is able to circle around and engage with some key Benjaminian notions such as "aura," "distraction," "phantasmagoria," or "the optical unconscious" in a wide range of examples and contexts ranging from radio journalism to children's picture books.

The book thus achieves two things that are fully in accord with Benjamin's sense of history: the reader is jolted into interpreting her or his present situation, while at the same time the urgencies of the past come alive. One poignant example is the 1930 essay (previously unpublished in English) titled "The Garlanded Entrance," in which Benjamin celebrated an exhibition in a local health center aimed at urban workers that used an avant-garde mixture of montage and fairground tricks in order to get across messages of public health education through techniques of exposition rather than a bare recitation of facts: "the only means we have left, for gaining time and keeping a cool head, is, above all, to let reality have its say—in its own right, disordered and anarchic if necessary" (p. 63).

I hope that these examples show how this anthology, which is intended for "the general reader and classroom use" (p. 7), has a structure in which each element builds towards an overall pattern that is rich and thought-provoking but coherent, thanks to the immense scholarship of the team of editors and translators. In terms of physical presence, the book is not too heavy or fat to carry around (a problem with some other anthologies), and the layout itself, garnished with appropriate illustrations, is accessible and clear, with space to breathe and reflect. In short, although at a hasty glance this book might...