I suspect that one reason that Benjamin’s “Work of Art…” essay is so rich is that its nineteen theses are not strictly accountable to one another. In fact, they advance proposals that are at times incompatible. One point of tension that I find particularly compelling is in Benjamin’s diverging accounts of the politics of technologically-mediated expression. While he offers a number of hopeful ideas concerning the possibilities of technological art and play, his final thesis (XIX) basically denigrates new forms of expression as tools of fascism.
Yesterday, Patrick mentioned that Adorno and Horkheimer did not anticipate a world in which the potential radicality of expression is undermined by its ubiquitous solicitation and its commodification into data. By contrast, it seems that Benjamin does when he argues that fascism maintains current property relations by “granting expression to the masses” instead of “granting them rights” (41). Though I’m mindful of the consequences of abstracting this argument from Benjamin’s historical context (1935-36 Europe), I can’t help but hear a prescient warning about the neoliberal co-optation of identity politics that today makes it possible to conflate cultural representation with political representation and to mistake recognition for justice. So much of the digital world today is organized around the ostensible virtues of expression and participation just as contemporary cultural production monetizes various forms of inclusion; while there is nothing inherently wrong with either of these developments, they are increasingly treated as ends in themselves, sought at the expense of more transformative gains.
One key difference is that the fascistic forms of expression that Benjamin has in mind are presumably singular and homogenizing, whereas today’s champion the rhetoric of diversity—though not necessarily plurality, which is to say that both facilitate the integration of various social forces into a totality without opposition. Another potential difference between these ideologies of expression is that for Benjamin, the fascist aestheticization of politics leads directly and inevitably to war. Remarkably, he seems to describe what Eisenhower later famously coins as the ‘military-industrial complex.’ As I understand it, Benjamin’s argument here is that a modern technological surplus needs to be put to productive use in order for capital to avoid the equitable distribution of resources, and war provides such an outlet. I’m not quite sure how we’d read this today, though (thoughts, anyone?). Of course, war continues to consolidate power and drain resources that should be devoted to the social good. But can we attribute this to the coercive cultures of expression that abound under neoliberalism’s affirmative power?
On the flip side, throughout most of this essay, Benjamin is rather hopeful. He regards film and other technological arts as playgrounds in which to seek out an “equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus” (37). For instance, he identifies successful film stars as having learned to “preserve [their] humanity in the face of the apparatus” (31) and he speculates that people subjected to their factory and office machines all day find pleasure in watching the actor master the apparatus. (This evokes both the pleasure that audiences found in the revenge they vicariously dispensed on their bosses in 9 to 5 (1980) and the kinds of pleasure that fans find in Instagram influencers’ abilities to perform authenticity despite and by means of a medium.) Here, Benjamin seems to be celebrating both the cathartic and instructive value of our encounters with technologically-mediated expression. Later, he explicitly praises the “possibility of psychic immunization” against mass violence that technological art (e.g. cinema) affords through its “therapeutic release of unconscious energies” (38)—a notion diametrically opposed to his closing argument that media technologies guarantee war by creating channels for cathartic expression. Are we supposed to choose between these? Can both be true?
For Benjamin, media technologies guide (but do not determine) the types of expression in which they are implicated. For instance, he observes that mass rallies and war are “especially suited” to cinematic representation, particularly the bird’s-eye view, in a footnote that evokes Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films and their staging of mass spectacle for the camera (54n36). In decades since, the performative and mediatized dimensions of activism (the staging of anti-fascist or otherwise progressive political actions for cameras, or decolonial efforts to contest the state’s monopoly on the aerial view, e.g. at Standing Rock) refute the notion that cameras invite a particular kind of politics. Still, a look at Riefenstahl’s films does suggest that certain political forms might be ‘especially suited’ to certain representational apparatuses. To what politics is Web 2.0 ‘especially suited’? How might more recent media-political developments help us reconcile between Benjamin’s radically divergent accounts of catharsis and expression? I suspect that his discussion of architecture as a form of non-representational art that conditions perception through habituation and immersive distraction (on page 40) may hold some of the answers.
Politics of Media 
It looks like Hansen can help us with this as well: “if Benjamin’s work goes to the heart of media politics today, … it is not because of either his techno-utopian or his media-pessimistic stance, but rather his radical ambivalence, his effort to think both positions through in their most extreme implications.” (43)
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The quote pulled from Benjamin, “granting expression to the masses” instead of “granting them rights” (41), stood out to me as well. In fact, it hit me like a blow to the chest with relevance for today’s internet culture. I recently had a conversation with a teacher/friend concerning this very phenomenon. The topic arose within a larger theme of education and how to properly teach at academic institutions, that is, the best practices given what seems to be a drastic shift in the comportment of students. I push back to say that I do think that Adorno and Horkheimer preview, to a certain extent, the ways in which access may ultimately entail adverse effects: “the abolition of education privilege by disposing of culture at bargain prices does not admit the masses to the preserves from which they were formerly excluded but, under the existing social conditions, contributes to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric incoherence” (130). The situation identified by Adorno and Horkeimer is not that of freedom of expression but the openness to education. While one may argue that Adorno and Horkheimer fail to identify as explicitly as Benjamin the undermining of newfound expression, I think there is a signpost in “The Culture Industry” that helps us to understand the relationship among current phenomenon carried out by political and capitalistic drives (granting expression to the masses via the internet, tv, etc and granting expression via education)–there’s a deeper connection and logic underpinning these perhaps on-the-surface disparate cases.
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Hi Sasha, thanks for this post. I was really interested in your reference to Benjamin on war as an inevitability following the aestheticization of politics. I am also grappling with his discussion of technology outstripping its use by society and instead pushing inevitably towards war. To me, a striking feature of Benjamin’s argument here is that colonial war is not merely explained as a means to expand the reach of capital, which would seem like a more conventional Marxist explanation, but something inherent to the technology itself. That war would be incited due to something like Marinetti’s description (because it’s beautiful) seems exaggerated, too, but when I think about it, perhaps it’s not so far-fetched. As you pointed out “Of course, war continues to consolidate power and drain resources that should be devoted to the social good. But can we attribute this to the coercive cultures of expression that abound under neoliberalism’s affirmative power?”. While I’m not sure precisely what you mean precisely by the “affirmative power of neoliberalism” it does seem like there are contemporary analogies visible in Web 2.0, as you raise. One would be the kind of foreign influence campaigns that we saw in the 2016 which could be thought of as direct weaponization of media technologies. A different kind of example would be the display of military might like in the televised “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq in 2003. Do these instances capture some of what Benjamin is discussing?
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