Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered
Abstract
Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated. And rightly so. Benjamin praises the cognitive, hence political, potential of technologically mediated cultural experience (film is particularly privileged).2 Yet the closing section of this 1936 essay reverses the optimistic tone. It sounds a warning. Fascism is a violation of the technical apparatus that parallels fascism's violent attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses-not by giving them their due, but by allowing them to express themselves.3 The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.4 Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations, but here he states categorically: All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.5 He is writing during the early period of fascist military adventurism-Italy's colonial war in Ethiopia, Germany's intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Yet Benjamin recognizes that the aesthetic justification of this policy was already in place at the century's start. It was the Futurists who, just before World War I,
Cite this
Susan Buck‐Morss (1992). Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October. https://doi.org/10.2307/778700
@article{susan1992aesthetics,
title = {Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered},
author = {Buck‐Morss, Susan},
year = {1992},
journal = {October},
doi = {10.2307/778700}
}Citations in this library
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 833 citations exist upstream.