Art and mass culture in Walter Benjamin

From the loss of aura to social transformation

Abstract

Much has been written about the opposition between the ideas of Benjamin and Adorno. There has also been insistence on Benjamin’s supposed nostalgia for the loss of aura in art. As if that not were enough, even a reading of Benjamin as a promoter of popular culture has been defended. The objective of this article is to situate oneself critically regarding the multiple interpretations that have been generated around Benjamin’s texts. If we carefully review ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, we will discover that there is no such nostalgia for the loss of aura in art. In a brief contrast with Horkheimer and Adorno, we will see that certain interpretations of these two authors –including that of Bolívar Echeverría– overlook two fundamental distinctions present in Benjamin’s discussion: one between the technique of mastery over nature and “game technique”, and another bewteen compact and proletarian mass. Faced with the diagnosis made by Echeverría, according to which history is on the side of Horkheimer and Adorno, I intend to show that the validity of Benjamin must be located in the debates on culture as a field of legitimation of class privilege, as well as in the various resistances that the masses have played in the course of history