Walter Benjamin and the Media by Kang Jaeho

Author:Kang, Jaeho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

Key Works

‘The Political Groupings of Russian Writers’ (1927)

‘Theories of German Fascism’ (1930)

‘The Author as Producer’ (1934)

‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’ (1934)

‘Theological–Political Fragment’ (1938)

Aesthetic Politics

In the context of the interplay of communication technology and politics, early twentieth-century Germany can be defined by the emergence of fascist movements and the rapid growth of new media such as radio and cinema. During the inter-war period, a number of radical German intellectual mandarins raised critical questions and provided insights that still merit careful theoretical consideration today. In the Weimar Republic, both conservative thinkers (such as Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and especially Ernst Jünger (1895–1998)) and left-oriented liberal intellectuals (such as Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935), Thomas Mann (1875–1955), and Bertolt Brecht), to name a few, were fully conscious of the profound transformation of the bourgeois public sphere and the rise of a new mass culture.25 Their primary responses to the impact of mass media on politics, whether lamentations over the ‘death’ of deliberative politics or the enthusiastic embrace of a new era of mass politics, converged in the crisis of liberal democracy. Across the political spectrum, then, these were shared concerns and Benjamin, too, was quick to grasp the changing dynamics of politics and the rapid growth of mass media in Western Europe and Russia. Unlike those mandarins – whether left-wing or right-wing – who were preoccupied with the ideological and institutional dimensions of politics, for Benjamin, as described in his 1930 essay, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, politics is primarily concerned with identifying ways of organizing experience. Benjamin’s media critique conducts a more penetrating investigation of the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of fascism by analysing how aesthetic experiences are interwoven with the formation of a political public.

Benjamin’s insight into the relationship between art and politics is famously set out in an explicit yet highly enigmatic passage in the Work of Art essay:

Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticization of politics, as practised by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art. (SW3, 122, original emphasis)

This concluding remark has led to some overly simplistic interpretations of Benjamin’s insights into the relationship between art and politics. One of these reductive readings of ‘the aestheticization of politics’ identifies fascism as a quasi-Wagnerian total work of art, while ‘the politicization of art’ is interpreted as Benjamin’s call for another form of propagandist art that can mirror the aestheticization of politics.26 These readings limit Benjamin’s analysis to a propagandist approach to art, and consequently miss the radical context of Benjamin’s critique of aesthetic politics. However, if Benjamin’s remarks about politics in the Work of Art essay are examined in conjunction with some of his other works, his ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (1930) and The Arcades Project, for example, it becomes evident that Benjamin’s account of the aestheticization of politics is more than a politically oriented investigation of the aesthetic dimensions of fascism.

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