Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered
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Article. — October. — 1992. — Vol. 62. (Autumn) — pp. 3-41.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 ofthe 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."
