Benjamin, Walter

« Benjamin accepts elements of Nietzsche's metaphysics. 3 Symbolism, melancholy and politics Benjamin's thought runs through two phases.

In his earlier work, which included the important essay 'Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften' (Goethe's Elective Affinities) (1922) and culminated in The Origin of German Tragic Drama , Benjamin is concerned to explore the manner in which art adopts pragmatic stances.

His initial target is what he calls the 'symbolist' approach to art: the view, whether asserted by critics or implied by art works themselves, that art makes magical contact with essential structures of reality.

It may issue (as it did with Goethe ) in a superstitious fatalism, or (as in certain seventeenth-century dramas) in a naive faith in the capacity of art mimetically to capture God's creation. Diametrically opposed to this stance is what Benjamin terms 'melancholy' , a scepticism about the claims of science and empirical knowledge.

The melancholic artist devises allegories and conceits to emphasize their despair at the inaccessibility of God's reality; the Baroque Trauerspiel is a typical example of this attitude.

However, this is a rash response to the problems of mimetic realism, or 'symbolism' , for there is a third possibility available to artists: an interventionist pragmatism.

This depends on their ability to perceive their own activities within a wider, political frame.

In Benjamin's view, if they can do this, they will 'awaken under the open sky of history'; but the precise nature of interventionist art is something that, in the early work, still remains obscure. 4 Technology The latter part of Benjamin's work - from the late 1920s onwards - was concerned to delineate with more precision how art assumes a political identity.

This was a matter of describing how art manifested itself in the public arena at all, and how it assimilated itself, deliberately or not, to the conflicts dominating that arena.

This discussion has two aspects: the theory of technology and the theory of history. Benjamin's most important essay on art and technology is 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit' (The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility) (1935).

He argues that there is a general tendency away from the 'auratic' .

Under more primitive social conditions, art primarily performs a ritual function, for example, a symbolization of the divinity.

It has a high 'cultic' value.

This, however, goes hand in hand with low public availability; cultic or auratic works of art retain or increase their power by being confined to inaccessible ritual spaces.

In the modern era, despite a decline of express ritual, aura is mimicked by high culture, which favours works that can be restricted to an elite (in museums, concert halls and opera houses). Because this 'auratic' approach evades the issues of contemporary history, however, it scarcely deserves the designation of culture.

Proper art has - indeed, has always had - its vehicles for engaging people in general.

These are, nowadays, the instruments of mass dissemination.

They have two aspects.

In the first place, modern art dispenses with the notion of the unique object, invested with auratic magic.

Modern art may be reproduced without. »