"... Benjamin estabishes the masses as the pre-eminent subject matter of a liberated cinema which he sees prefigured in certain Russian fims (eg. Vertov): 'Any man today can claim to being filmed.' To be sure, this phrase also concerns changes in the relations of reception, in particular the democratization of expertise which upsets the traditional hierarchy between the author and the reader/viewer. But modelling his notion of expertise on the fluctuating boundary between commentator and participant in popular discourse on sports events [...], Benjamin draws a problematic analogy between live events and a medium of spatio-temporal displacement - an analogy that assumes an unproblematic relationship between film and reality. Relying thus upon the iconic self-evidence of photographic reproduction, he suggestively conflates semiotic and political senses of representation, making the latter vouch for the revolutionary potential of the former."
(Miriam Hansen, Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology')
"The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation." (WB) But what is the nature of these forms of participation? The trick is to create an illusion of choice, 'user-choice' that is strictly part of commodity relations.
"Developments in communication and information technology make free and immediate exchange more possible, while the impoverishment of their use merely reinforces the pseudo-participation allowed by the spectacle"
(Sadie Plant, "The Most Radical Gesture")
since 19/11/96
There are a number of obvious artistic exemplars who are either mentioned in the text or who impinge on the mind when reading the Artwork essay: John Heartfield is a powerful understood presence, as well as Atget, Rodchenko and Brecht. But alongside these are other more entwined and intricate evocations that take root at around the time when Benjamin was writing the essay. From among them can be traced a historical sub-plot which brings together a diverse range of practices and idiolects around the concept 'masses': a shadowy itinerary can be mapped from a unique German portraiture project in the 20s and 30s right up to a BBC video broadcast programme in the 1990s. August Sander was working in Germany on his 'Face of the Age' photographic project from the 1920s to 1936 when the Face of the Age publication was banned by the Nazis and stocks destroyed; Mass Observation was created in Britain by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings in 1937. In particular the film-making style of Jennings coincides at several points with Benjamin's ideas. As David Mellor points out, Jennings' consciousness of the photo-mechanical nature of the mass media coupled with his interest in the surrealist categories of objet trouvé and ready-made and cinematic techniques of cutting and montage leads to a "Benjaminesque notion of Documentary as the 'magnificent system'". (It is not surprising to note the similarity in Benjamin's and Jennings aims of producing books made up only of quotations.) Mass Observation extended in practice Benjamin's theoretical discussion of the relationship between new technologies of vision and political empowerment, but at its heart was a profound dilemma which can be resumed simply: was it observing the masses, or was it the masses observing themselves? This contradiction lived on during the 60s when locally produced videos were championed as politically and socially progressive cultural forces by Community Arts groups. And when in the 1990s the BBC Community Programme Unit through 'Video Nation' attempted to give those living and working outside the broadcast television apparatus a chance to make their own interpretations of themselves and their everyday environments they merely perpetuated the problem.
It is this unravelling of a plot involving among other things portraiture and identity, surrealism and the social programme of the British documentary movement which gives an added retrospective and prospective value to Benjamin's deliberations on modernity, politics and new technologies.
"It is important to realize that for Benjamin 'copy' and 'distraction' are subsidiary concepts to that of the 'masses'. It is mass production that produces the copy, the standardised product, and mass consumption that produces 'diversion' or 'distraction'. His modernist transformation of aesthetics is founded on the postulate of Fordism, capitalist production in its most contemporary form. Just as the Model T replaces the customized coach or car, so the copy replaces the original. The scandal of Benjamin's approach is that this involves reversing the traditional terms of discussion. For Benjamin, the copy becomes associated with the true, and the original with the false [copyright]. Exhibition value, brought to dominance by the copy, brings the masses close to reality, whereas cult value, the province of the original, required contemplation at a distance, to be rewarded by a spiritual, rather than a secular, and real, experience. The decay of the 'aura', the special quality of cult value, is part of the general decay of magic, theology, and metaphysics.
(Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox)
"... the meaning of the hidden configuration (which reveals the beauty of that stanza to its very depth) probably is this: it is the phantom crowd of the words, the fragments, the beginnings of lines from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the poetic booty."(WB)