Adorno

Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 217

and Adorno may be said to have been asking the same type of question,
albeit from different points of view. They were both interested in the
changing relations of form and content in the different manifestations
of modern art, its production and reception in post-bourgeois society.^18
Whereas Benjamin, in exile in Paris, hoped to ‘uncover the hidden
structures in contemporary art’,^19 the thoughts of Adorno, who was
studying in Oxford, were driven by the fear that the aesthetic achieve-
ments of the radical avant-garde would fall victim to the integrating
mechanisms of mass culture.
At the centre of Benjamin’s analysis of the relation between art and
technical reproduction stood the concept of aura, the chief characteristic
of traditional art.^20 With the mass reproduction of pictures made possible
by the invention of photography and film, traditional art loses its original
auratic quality.

What withers in the age of technological reproducibility of the

work of art is the latter’s aura. This process is symptomatic; its

significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated

as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches

the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating

the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a

unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the

recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is

reproduced. These two processes lead to a massive upheaval in the

domain of objects handed down from the past – a shattering of

tradition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal

of mankind.^21

The point of Benjamin’s argument was that it enabled him to perceive
a positive benefit in ‘the liquidation of the traditional value of the
cultural heritage’. He welcomed, therefore, ‘the destruction of aura’
and the related failure of ‘the criterion of authenticity to be applicable
to artistic production’.^22 Because the work of art in its transition from
the nineteenth to the twentieth century is determined by its ‘exhibition
value’, a change is engineered in the social function of the entire realm
of aesthetics. Its theological orientation towards ritual is replaced by the
revolutionary task of liberating the suppressed creative potential of the
masses. Taking the example of the montage technique used in the avant-
garde silent film, Benjamin tried to show that, with the historical change
in the production and reception of art, art could become an instrument
of political revolution for the first time in history. In the ‘simultaneous
collective experience’ of the film, in its ‘collective laughter’, the audience
organizes and controls itself. Through constant practice it becomes expert.
According to Benjamin, the emancipatory effect of a mass art stripped
of its aura is a weapon against the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’,
which he opposed by positing the ‘politicization of art’.^23