It Just Won't Go Away

I'm pretty sure I was forced to read Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction at least once a semester every single semester I was at Yale, and for once, I'm grateful for all of the forced repetition. There are few pieces of text more relevant or more clearly pertinent to our current political situation that Benjamin's epilogue. It's tragic that this clear analysis of the present comes from an essay originally written to describe the rise of Fascism in Germany.


The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin, 1936

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of the masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property stucture which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.* The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its furher cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for the mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis off war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: "For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic... Accordingly we state: ...War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades. the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages and many others.... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!"

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today's war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not be sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production- in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion technology which it collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

"Fiat ars- pereat mundus," (let art be created - though the world shall perish) says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification fo a sense of perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of "l'art pour l'art" (art for art's sake). Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object off contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of the politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.


* One technical feature is significant here, especially with regard to newsreels, the propagandist importance of which can hardly be overestimated. Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of the masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be stressed, is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography. Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. A bird's-eye view best captures the gatherings of hundreds of thousands. And even though such a view may be accessible to the human eye, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. This means mass movements, including war, constitutes a form of human behavior which particularly favors mechanical equipment.