Eli Solt

Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay A Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility, acknowledges and critiques the changing modes of technological reproduction and the effects these new forms have on art and politics. On a recent discussion board, Chesley Bond shared a post questioning how today’s availability of cameras in cell phones and publishing platforms like Instagram reflect Benjamin’s ideas about reproduction and the mass marketing of art. This idea really fascinated me and made me want to explore these questions even further, using Benjamin’s analytical structure and ideas to examine our changing modes of perception in relationship to social media, our political landscape, and the world.

The technological advancement Walter Benjamin discusses most in his essay is that of film. Benjamin was born in 1892 and thus grew up witnessing the birth and significant advance in filmic technologies. By the waning years of the 19th century, the materiality and aura of photography had been transformed and stretched into a rapid-moving structure of 24 single images every second. Movies became a driving force in culture initially due to their value of attraction and spectacle and then later because of their mass-producibility for international audiences.

A century later, the cinema is still a dominant cultural force but the line defining cinema has been dramatically blurred. YouTube shows, Instagram videos, and Snapchat stories all reflect some artistic mode of production. Even photographs and short twitter blurbs can be read as artistic expressions. The incredible quantity of these expressions that get put out onto the Internet every second is difficult to comprehend. According to digital consultant David Sayce, 500 million tweets are sent every day. Even more mind-boggling, 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram each day and on YouTube there are 300 hours of video uploaded every single minute (Biographon). It is unlikely that Walter Benjamin would have ever been able to predict or comprehend the direction the rest of the 20th and 21st centuries would take, however, his theory about artistic reproduction still has significant merit. 

Benjamin clearly depicted a historical trend that showed that art was becoming increasingly reproducible and at the same time losing its “aura”. He describes aura in the following terms: “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art–its unique existence in a particular place” (Benjamin 232). This concept of aura works incredibly well for physical art like paintings and sculptures but mediums like film complicate it. A film is never really created in one moment, it is a long process that involves a plethora of artists and storytellers working sometimes together, sometimes individually. And even when there is a finished product it is hard to say whether that is a completed work. 1940s experimental director Maya Deren suggested it wasn’t saying: “a work is never completed, but merely abandoned”. 

Social media takes the cinema’s complication to the extreme. In a world with a digital system of “1’s” and “0’s”, what really constitutes an image or video’s time and place? Is it when it was taken? When it was published? When it “went viral”? Art on social media is marked now more than ever with time and date stamps so you can always look back to when exactly it was posted. But does that originality contain an aura when it can just be reposted at a later time and look exactly the same as the original? I think Benjamin would not consider that kind of reproduction as having an aura. 

Another important question that social media brings up is ‘what can we even consider art’? Benjamin talks at length about montage within film saying “The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke” (Benjamin 237). The method of montage brings together all of the different elements of the film into one organic whole. Famous Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Lev Kuleshov suggested that “…every art from has two technological elements: material itself and the methods of organizing that material” (Kuleshov 139). So, if montage within film creates a unity, there is no unity in social media, just a mess of chaotic ideas with different intentions from every direction. Social media cannot act as a whole because the pieces come from so many different backgrounds. 

The final aspect of Benjamin’s theory that can be applied to social media are the economic and political conditions that drive it and also result from it. I would argue that social media as we see it today is largely a byproduct of our neoliberal capitalist society. Our materialistic society is on a trajectory to commodify every single aspect of human life and social media allows us to do so by not only sharing our lives with others but making things like “likes” and “friends” something that we value and want more of. Instagram influencers and YouTube stars make tons of money sharing their everyday lives and people are obsessed with them.

Even the current rise of brands and companies having a stronger social media presence reflects the commodification of our lives and value in the superficial. On the surface, it would appear as though social media gives us the power to express our individuality within society when the reality we actually see is the production of content that reinforces bourgeois standards as opposed to the spark of proletariat revolution and solidarity. Sharing on the Internet, therefore, can become a means of distracting the working classes from their actual losses and the growing inequality of the classes. The discourse can be fed into online but that has a difficult time translating into revolution in the streets which reflects a modern kind of false consciousness. 

I think Benjamin’s fears about the aestheticization of politics is beginning to take different forms on social media. Supposedly harmless content and social media fixtures like the sharing of “memes” may have an underlying problem in the way that they do make politics something to be “looked at”. The number of politicians who use social media to interact with constituents and express their ideas is a great way to encourage democratic participation but it can also fuel this commodification of every aspect of our culture. Even when politicians themselves share the memes or even other images, can we not view that as an aestheticization of politics? Donald Trump’s tweets are an obvious example but an important one when looking at where this kind of political interaction via social media could be headed. One of the biggest questions that this exploration leaves me with is this: is the rise of nationalism and populism around the world today the logical outcome of the destruction of the aura and the explication of technological reproduction via forms of internet communication and social media?

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second         Version).” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Bedford/St. Martins, 2011, pp. 229–252.

“BiographON.” BiographON, https://biographon.com/youtube-stats/.

"neo-liberal, adj. and n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2019,   www.oed.com/view/Entry/245592. Accessed 9 October 2019.

Kuleshov, Lev. “The Principles of Montage.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and             Contemporary Readings, Bedford/St. Martins, 2011, pp. 137-146.

Sayce, David. “Social Media Archives.” David Sayce, https://www.dsayce.com/category/social-     media/.

Turl, Adam. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” Red Wedge, Red Wedge, 1  May 2019, http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/digital-reproduction.

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