This is a followup to a previous post, where I complained that the internet information environment shifts a lot of work from the creation/dissemination side to the consumer/user side.
Walter Benjamin offered another much richer analysis in his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He lived long before the internet, and was talking about radio, movies, print, and photography. His description of the “extension of the press” sounds a lot like social media:
“For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.”
His concern is more about the different experience of being a creator rather than a consumer, and how that difference was blurring, even nearly a century ago:
“Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.“
His point, as I understand it (or one of his points, at least) is about how agents of control such as authoritarian, totalitarian, fascist, trumpist political regimes, try to exploit that blurring in order to manipulate the population. It begins with the use of “celebrity” (Benjamin does not use that term) beyond the medium itself to project into the rest of the audience’s lives:
“The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.“
The “aura” is Benjamin’s term for how a viewer experiences an original piece of art. I think by “original piece of art” he meant a piece direct from the artist or author, not mechanically reproduced. Although the distinction is hard to follow, at least for me. A painting or sculpture would be included, but I’m not sure about something like a poem or a novel experienced via a book. Or maybe he was limiting his argument to film.
You can see the projection of celebrity as a replacement for expertise in the current regime, which is mostly directed not by experts, statesmen, or anything that would once have been called “leaders,” but by TV hosts, reality show contestants, podcasters, outspoken billionaires, and influencers. The agents of control use current media to turn politics from something that individuals participate in (like experiencing original art) to something they watch. A show. You’re not involved, just sit back at a distance.
I don’t fully understand the epilogue to Benjamin’s essay, in which he refers to Filippo Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism. That’s a 1909 essay that seems to glorify and promote war. Specifically war enhanced by mechanized weaponry that can slaughter on then-unprecedented scale. There’s a lot of history there that I’m not familiar enough with, but it’s clear that the fascists of the time applauded Marinetti’s ideas. After all, mass slaughter could be another spectacle the audience could just sit back and watch.
When the current regime murderously, violently invaded Minnesota (not to mention what they did in Venezuela and Iran), and when they participated in the slaughter in Gaza, they must have been expecting that we’d all act like “the audience.” After all, that’s how they formed their whole regime; thinking about Americans as nothing more than “the audience.”
But Americans are remembering that we are not the audience. Or at least we are more than just the audience. We are, collectively, an institution. The largest one of all. The institution of the citizen.
