The Aura’s Waning and the Political Turn: Rereading Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” Essay
When images can be infinitely reproduced and circulated, how do our perceptual structures, art’s social function, and political mobilization fundamentally change?
The German thinker Walter Benjamin completed “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility” in 1935, revising it in 1936. It was famously included in the posthumous English collection Illuminations (1968), edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. The essay situates photography and film within the grand framework of “technical reproducibility,” discussing the transformation and politicization of contemporary art. It is not an aesthetic textbook but a precise media diagnosis, and it has long served as a foundational text for media and image studies.
Core Concepts: Aura, Politics, and New Perception
Benjamin’s argument unfolds along four primary paths:
1. The Waning of the “Aura”: From Unique Presence to Reproducibility
The authority of traditional art stemmed from its “here and now,” its irreplaceable authenticity (the “presence” of the original). Technical reproduction (photography, film) shatters this: the work can be moved, enlarged, and edited, causing the “aura” to wither. This signifies a shift in meaning from “sacred distance” to “secular proximity.” In photography, this explains why a photo’s value no longer relies on the original print but on the re-configuration of its visibility.
2. From Ritual Value to Exhibition Value: The Social Turn in Art’s Function
Art no longer primarily serves ritual and tradition. Instead, it turns toward mass “exhibition,” education, propaganda, and consumption. “Exhibition value” becomes central: how an image is seen, disseminated, and placed in layouts or galleries. This provided a theoretical beginning for later concepts of a media-driven public sphere and the propagandistic use of images.
3. The Aestheticization of Politics vs. The Politicization of Art
Fascism packages politics as an aesthetic spectacle (rallies, rituals, visual grandeur) to mobilize the masses. The Left, Benjamin argues, must counter this by “politicizing art”—making art that responds to and intervenes in social reality. The proposition: under the conditions of technical reproducibility, the structural relationship between art and politics is rewritten, and the image becomes a double-edged sword of mobilization and liberation.
4. Film as New Perception: Training through Distraction, Shock, and Montage
Through camera movement, montage, and the close-up, film cuts the world apart and reassembles it. The audience, in a state of “distraction,” is trained, acquiring a new perceptual rhythm through “shock.” For photography and film criticism, this illustrates that the technical form is a form of perceptual education; the image is not a passive reproduction but an active shaping of reality.
Value and Impact: As Toolkit and Triangular Fulcrum
The enduring value of Benjamin’s essay can be understood on two levels:
- Value as Method and Tool: Benjamin provides three key tools: (a) The social history of the “aura,” using presence vs. reproducibility to explain art’s waning authority; (b) A model of functional shift (“ritual value” vs. “exhibition value”) to analyze the image’s displacement; (c) A political criterion for identifying how images become tools of mobilization or critique. This toolkit allows criticism to move beyond mere form and into the intersection of media, society, and politics.
- Long-Term Impact: This essay forms a “triangular fulcrum” for visual culture, alongside Sontag’s On Photography and Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Sontag extends its political-ethical concerns, while Barthes explores the spectator, time, and mourning. It has profoundly influenced installation criticism, archive politics, and digital culture studies. From the newspaper page to the social media feed, image circulation operates on the logic of “exhibition value,” and the debate over whether the “aura” has returned or has been definitively liquidated in the digital age remains a central theme of new media criticism.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility” teaches us that when confronting an image, we must simultaneously ask how our perception is being trained, how authority is being rewritten, and how politics is operating through that image.
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