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Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Aura in Education: A

Rereading of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

Article  in  Journal of Philosophy of Education · January 2008

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9752.2007.00579.x

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Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2007

Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital

Reproduction: Aura in Education:
A Rereading of ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

NICK PEIM

This paper considers a key text in the field of Cultural Studies

for its relevance to questions about the identity of knowledge
in education. The concept of ‘aura’ arises as being of special
significance in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ as a way of understanding the change that
occurs to art when mass reproduction becomes both
technologically possible and industrially realised. Aura seems
to signify something of the symbolic halo generated by objects
of special significance that is both powerful and indefinite.
This paper argues that aura is in fact the necessary property
of symbolic representation—and that it attaches as much to
the figure of Walter Benjamin as it does to any canonical work
of art. But the paper also claims that Benjamin’s argument
about the significance of popular forms of art—particularly
photography and film—can be updated and applied to critical
questions about the established order of knowledge in
education. This is particularly relevant to those curriculum
domains where specific objects—texts, for example—are
invested with powerful auras. It may also be applicable to
all forms of established knowledge and curricula.

What claim might be made for presenting the figure of Walter Benjamin
(1892–1940) and one particular text, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’ (1999a), in the context of philosophy of
education? While Benjamin is not conventionally regarded as a
philosopher, various claims have been made on Benjamin’s behalf for
his having cultivated ‘a highly original philosophical method’ and one
which is concerned, among many other things, with ‘a dialectics of seeing’
(Buck-Morse, 1991, pp. 6, 9). My approach here to this key text in
Benjamin’s oeuvre addresses some phenomenological and ontological
questions, beyond ‘a dialectics of seeing’, about authorship and authority,
and the interpretation and status of texts. These things we might refer to as

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364 N. Peim

the paraphernalia—or perhaps, more respectfully, as the ‘technology’—of

knowledge.
The attempt to engage with issues arising from one single text, however,
is complicated by a number of factors. These include: the identity and
symbolic meanings attached to the figure of the author; the historical
‘residue’ between the author and the present time—or the temporal
dimension of textuality; the polysemic nature of texts and meanings—the
uncertainty of their borders, in effect; the technologies of reproduction
that constitute the medium of textual forms and their circulation; and the
determination of the discursive field in institutionalised practices (such as,
textual canons, subject determinations and curricula). In other words, the
text ‘itself’ cannot be determined as a strictly delimited entity (Derrida,
1978, 1987). This exploration will necessarily attempt to engage with
issues and questions relating to ‘the condition of knowledge’ as it is
affected by these textual factors (Lyotard, 1984). These themes are partly
phenomenological—to do with relations between subjects and objects.1
They can also be construed—productively, if perilously—as bearing upon
ontological issues to do with the cultural politics of the textual dimension
of education.
The attempt to engage with issues arising from a single text, however, is
already complicated by a number of factors. These include a number of
things that are ‘extra-textual’: for example, the identity and symbolic
meanings attached to the figure of the author; the historical ‘residue’
between the time of writing and the present time; the polysemic nature of
texts and meanings—the uncertainty of their borders, in effect; the
technologies of reproduction that constitute the medium of textual forms
and their dissemination; and the determination of the discursive field in
institutionalised practices, such as, textual canons, subject determinations
and curricula. The text ‘itself’ cannot be determined as a strictly delimited
entity (Derrida, 1978, 1987). This exploration will necessarily attempt to
engage with issues and questions relating to ‘the condition of knowledge’
as it is affected by these textual factors (Lyotard, 1984).2
In this context, we may consider, for example, the persistence of English
as a central and perhaps defining subject in the National Curriculum in
relation to the different ways in which Media Studies and Cultural Studies
have developed traditions of knowing and understanding the textual field.
In English, questions about significance, culture and meaning, as well as a
range of techniques for approaching textual content, opening up the very
question of content and value, have been eschewed by the formal
institutionalised version of the subject, even while its advocates in the UK,
in Australia and in the USA have proposed a more inclusive conception of
subject identity. Benjamin’s text has a powerful bearing on this.3

TEXTUAL AURA: AUTHOR AND AUTHORITY

While the intention of this paper is to re-examine Benjamin’s ‘The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1999a)4 alone, as

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 Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction 365

suggested above contingent factors compromise the limits and borders of

the text, rendering the ‘text alone’ as always already problematic. These
contingent factors, though, are not accidental. The text cannot arrive alone
any more than its limits can be strictly delimited. The text arrives with a
halo of intertextual resonances, a host of supplementary features,
including the relations between writing and the traces it both generates
and draws upon and the figure of the author (Foucault, 1988). Walter
Benjamin arrives to us, as it were, as a cultural theorist, an emblematic
figure in Cultural Studies, and as an exemplary modern intellectual whose
life is inscribed with the quality of his times. The significance of the
author in this sense belongs to the relations between text and discourse,
between the apparent given content of the text and the context of its
appearance. But this appearance is not uncomplicated.
Any attempt to reactivate this text in relation to concerns with the social
symbolic or semiotic within educational settings, no matter how
rigorously we might read the ‘text itself’, has to concede that the text is
(still) somehow related to our sense of this figure, the author. I will suggest
here that questions arising from a reading of this text—which bear upon
matters of data, interpretation and archives in subject identity—are also
questions that are strongly related to this author and the relations of the
author to authority. These questions have a powerful bearing on education.
Perhaps the first question to address is: How does a text—any text—
announce itself as worthy of attention? Why this text? What lends it
significance and by what right, power or claim might it demand attention?
In this case, perhaps in all such cases, the question of significance can
initially only be asked rhetorically, retrospectively—given that the text in
question already claims attention by its institutionalised status. ‘The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ appears in several
academic contexts and has achieved the status of a ‘classic’ in Cultural
Studies by force of citation. Its status and identity are characterised by
something perhaps best defined—in its own terms—as ‘aura’. This is a
key word in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
and a dominant theme. The word ‘aura’ here, as I am using it, seems to
refer to the excess of meaning that attaches to any symbolic entity. A
symbol must always point beyond itself—an apparently simple fact that
has haunted Western thought from de Saussure to Derrida. At the same
time, aura, as Benjamin uses the term, also refers to a special status or
resonance that emanates from the position of the text in the order of things
and with its identity as classic.
What’s more, the aura of this text cannot be separated from the aura that
attaches to the figure of Benjamin. One dimension of this aura derives
from the special status accorded to Walter Benjamin in Cultural Studies
as a pioneer, even prescient, intellectual. When we begin to confront this
text that celebrates the end of aura we find ourselves at every turn
entrammelled in aura (Scheurmann, 1993).
And why Walter Benjamin in this context? The indissoluble link
between text and name, according to the already established status of this
text, are elements in a structure that already defines a certain,

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366 N. Peim

‘educational’ significance (see Bourdieu, 1991; Macherey, 1978). Can the

question of the sense and significance of Benjamin be asked anew—and
rendered meaningful in the context of questions in education about
authority, about textuality, aura and meaning? In so far as the encounter
with the text is also an encounter with Benjamin, its significance,
potentially at least, extends to what constitutes, defines and delimits the
determination of a field.

THE DETERMINATION OF WALTER BENJAMIN

The very claim that Benjamin’s text says something ‘original’ necessitates
a historical reading, locating Benjamin within a specific era, locating
Benjamin’s text within an understanding of its context. This is not a
straightforward matter. Between Benjamin, and us—and between
Benjamin, us and the subjects Benjamin’s work engages with—is an
indissoluble, and multi-modal historical residue. The residue consists of
events, changes in perspective, accumulated ideas, all our own concerns,
ways of seeing, ways of knowing, as well as ways of organising and
institutionalising knowledge. All of these things have undergone
transformations in the interim, through changes of ideologies, technolo-
gies, institutions and practices of perception and knowledge. All this
material cannot be erased, bracketed or simply suspended in order to
enable a direct confrontation with Benjamin alone: nor, of course, with the
text alone. This residue complicates what might be said in relation to the
significance of Benjamin and problematises the question: Why Benjamin?
Why Benjamin here and now? This residue always already interferes
with—or ‘contaminates’?—our ‘direct’ contact with the text in question.
In other words, it is not possible to confront ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’ without also in some sense confronting the
figure or the idea of the historical Benjamin and the modes of identifying,
knowing and reading that inform our own sense of ‘the textual object’.
The figure of Benjamin, then, cannot be confronted ‘face to face’—
given the disturbance between Benjamin and the present ‘now’. This
present itself is already elusive, ontologically slippery, caught in the
movement of the trace, as Jacques Derrida would have it, that disrupts its
very present-ness. The present is doubly fractured by the dispersal of any
collective self or identity that might now, in the same way, in the same
moment, produce the absent but invoked presence of Benjamin.
Within certain field of knowledge, the historical residue that attaches to
the name of Walter Benjamin can be described as an aura. For some, it
takes the form of a symbolic halo: making Benjamin a tragic hero of
modern times. As will be indicated, Benjamin’s aura is suffused with a
particular and particularly resonant history that lends a certain perhaps
poignant, perhaps revolutionary but always political accent to the name
(Eagleton, 1981). But as with any aura, there can be no strict
determination of its significance: it belongs to the indeterminable domain
of the symbolic, its specificity enclosed by the determinations of

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discourse—the inherited meanings that accrue within given practices of

meaning.

BENJAMIN AS AURA
There can be no singular answer to what makes Benjamin significant—in
relation to questions of knowledge and education, or indeed to any other
matters. The name of Walter Benjamin symbolises a number of qualities,
events, judgements and positions. It is a name that conjures an era, an
identity, a style of intellect and a way of thinking and seeing, as well as a
way of being in the world. Benjamin’s ‘aura’ is the product of this restless,
multidimensional, polysemic symbolism. This aura is magnified and
intensified by the status of Walter Benjamin as a figure, an author, a
‘genius’ whose life is also subject to various representations, re-makings,
reinterpretations and redefinitions—the centre of a welter of signifying
acts and texts (Grasskamp, 1993). This figure of Benjamin clearly serves
as a metaphor for past ‘objects’ via a range of sources, via different
interpretative configurations, different forms of archive. In all this the
figure of Benjamin comes to enjoy its own specific kind of aura—an
excess that attributes significances to the name.
One way to identify Walter Benjamin that is highly relevant to the field
of education is as an author, a figure established and, in the Foucauldian
sense, archived and registered as an author associated with certain themes
and domains of knowledge. This is to locate Benjamin as a figure in
discourse. This process of granting recognition lends a particular
significance and authority to texts and textual material associated with
the name: and, for us, in the Nietzschean sense, the name is all we have to
give a kind of coherence, or at least the semblance of a unity, to the textual
legacy (Nietzsche, 1992; Derrida, 1986). As indicated, the identity of
Benjamin is always a textual matter, always a composite of readings and
established meanings. This ‘author figure’ (to borrow Foucault’s phrase) is
a composite of these assigned readings and meanings (Foucault, 1988).
Among these readings and meanings are the narrative details and
documentary fragments of the life as embedded in a particular phase of
modern European history: this open-ended archive includes childhood
photographs, memoirs, a series of postcards, copies of the signature, the
final unpaid hotel bill and other documents that constitute an evolving and
decentred archive (Scheurmann, 1993). This association—of the name to
the documentary fragments, to the figure—in turn lends a particular
resonance also to the work that is deemed to be more than contingently
marked by the life and its historical context. As Benjamin is established as
an author with certain features and qualities, this same figure also becomes
the subject (or object?) of a discourse of character—and of a discourse of
history.
Benjamin’s person becomes an object of interest, a symbol of its times:
he was, we are told, a troubled soul, a saturnine spirit, a European above
all, though always already an exile and by lifestyle choice a wanderer on
the borders: very much a spirit of the times. Benjamin is the unlikely and

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368 N. Peim

powerful compound: urban, intellectual, both Jewish and Marxist, an

outsider and a wanderer across national boundaries and in the arcades of
Paris (Benjamin, 1999b; Sontag, 1983). This imputed character and
lifestyle lend a peculiar kind of weight to the historical significance of the
figure, caught as it is in the terrible cogs of Europe’s most depressing and
violent period. In later versions of Benjamin, this makes him a veritable
postmodern figure (O’Connor, 1989). The meaning of his work resonates
with the symbolic aura of this precipitously postmodern figure of manifold
identity and of no fixed abode. As an author Benjamin’s ‘work’ is
identified with this life: the established body of texts that have acquired an
authority status resonate with the established elements of identity that also
constitute the significance of the author. To define Walter Benjamin in this
way necessitates reading Benjamin in a way that involves a complex
weighing of perspectives that must engage with the aura of the figure.

THE TEXT IN QUESTION: ‘THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION’
The question ‘Why this text?’, then, can be answered by locating the text
in its intertextual networks, within the discourses that give it life and
significance and that realise its historical nature. In what—necessarily
metaphoric—sense does this text ‘speak’ to us, though, here and now, and
to our concerns? The text in question will here have to serve as a pretext,
as a text among others that announce a theme, or series of themes. Even
without taking into consideration any claims as to its absolute authority,
its originality or its authenticity, its reading will be caught up with issues
raised by the multiple, protean spectre of Walter Benjamin, rendering
‘the-text-itself’ an impossible entity.
Provisionally, the issues at stake in approaching ‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ can be summarised in advance as:

! aura, conceived of both as the excess of signification and as the

special status that discourse gives to a text or object;
! the figure of the author as it lends identity to a text and carries with
its name its own aura;
! textual identity as embedded in an intertextual network and a field of
discourse;
! changing technologies in relation to modalities of knowledge and
the determination of significance.
In Benjamin’s case these issues engage with a general field of neo-
Marxism and cultural theory—asking questions about representation,
identity and meaning, borders and trajectories. All of these issues relate to
questions of knowledge, to the determination of significant objects and
archives. Aura, a key concept in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’, is one key idea that that can hold the others,
albeit provisionally, together. The concept of aura, as defined here within
and in relation to Benjamin’s text, is central to the production of

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 Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction 369

knowledge in history, in literature and in media studies, for instance. The

concept of aura offers one way of thinking through the implications of the
changing conditions of knowledge and of re-examining questions about
the authority of knowledge, its institutionalised and determinate status in
education (Peim, 2001).
The argument is concerned with the nature and definition of the work of
art in new technological conditions. A major element of the text’s
argument is to suggest not simply that the way we perceive things changes
but also that the very idea of a work of art changes—to the extent that it
becomes impossible to retain. This is a radically deconstructive move that
calls into question the independent existence of the constructed object—
‘art’ in this case—outside of the discourses and world that give it life and
meaning. This clearly has epistemological significance beyond the domain
of art. In the contemporary context, the technologies of reproduction have
become intensified and reconfigured, adding another dimension to the
seminal quality of Benjamin’s essay.
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ begins by
declaring an interest in changes to the superstructure in relation to
changing conditions of production—or new technologies (Benjamin,
1999a, p. 219). The emergence of ideas concerning radical changes in
superstructural relations brought about by changing conditions of
production ‘brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as
creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery’. The text identifies
these concepts as fascist in character when applied in an uncontrolled
manner. They are fascist because they rely on elites, hieratic figures and a
strict caste system of culture that excludes the masses from real
appropriation. This fascistic domain of art is set in opposition to the
democratic tendencies of new forms of mechanically reproduced mass art
or popular culture. In effect this identifies the text as a key point of
reference in superstructural theory, resonating with a tradition of neo-
Marxist thought that accords superstructural relations other than
determinist significance (Harland, 1987).
In its preamble ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ also refers to ‘the politics of art’ (Benjamin, 1999a, p.
220). Throughout there is a focus on the idea of the work of art, but
significantly and frequently the text slips into a mode of reference that
indicates that this essay is dealing with changes in modes of representation
itself, in a sense with the end of the specific and discrete domain of art and,
in the not very long run, with the intrusion of issues of representation into
the politics of daily life. In this sense the text’s thesis over-reaches itself,
exceeds its given project and proposes an ontological shift of great
significance. The very idea of the work of art is put ‘under erasure’ just as
later the distinction between work, art and audience is implicitly
suspended. This strikingly deconstructive move clearly has implications
for how we conceive of knowledge, its objects, archives and institutions.
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ thus opens
questions to do with signs and meanings, questions of epistemology—
within a materialist philosophical frame that is rethinking social relations

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as expressed in culture and proposing new ways of seeing and knowing

associated with the emergence and development of new technologies.
The text distinguishes between reproduction and work of art, the former
standing as a kind of poor relation of the latter. In section ii, Benjamin
works on the distinction between the work of art and its reproduction. Its
importance will be taken to inhere in the discussion of the idea of original
against reproduction.
There are two ideas at work here that are particularly germane to the
authority of the text in the field of education. One is the idea of
authenticity and the other again is the idea of aura. These concepts bear
upon subsequent theories of the symbolic (see Lacan and Foucault) and to
the idea of cultural education (literature, language, media studies, history,
. . .) as a special domain defined by a particular series of objects and a
more or less prescribed set of practices (Edwards and Usher, 1994). Such
theoretical promptings open up the question of the delimitation of this
domain, not simply in order to undo its claim to discreteness and integrity,
but to explore its formation and its potential reformation. This potentially
political project in the field of knowledge and culture is made possible by
a kind of suspension of its assumption of a given object or series of objects
or archive—and an opening of the question of proper rights of the
symbolic within this broad textual, cultural domain (Foucault, 1981;
Lacan, 2006). Greimas’s definition of a domain ‘in search of a name’,
drawing on linguistics, but not identical with it, comes to mind here: the
domain of the semiotic, concerning itself with the realm of meanings,
discourses and ideas within the field of representation. This is perhaps an
impossible but inescapable domain, we might say, that takes as its
provenance the whole field of language and textuality (Greimas, 1987,
p. 180).
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is far from
naı̈ve about the distinction between authenticity and reproduction. This
lack of naivety is evident in the text’s deployment of the concept of the
‘aura’. It is this ‘aura’, which comes from the uniqueness of the work of
art, that is destroyed in the age of mechanical reproduction. The process of
mechanical reproduction detaches the ‘reproduced object from the domain
of tradition’ (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 223). The technology that produces no
end of multiple copies for distribution enables the symbolic content of the
object (without the accompanying aura of the object itself) to be carried
into a myriad of different ‘situations’ (ibid.). It is the dispersal of that
presence into any number of different contexts that fragments the
traditional meaning and status of the object (ibid.). This idea of dispersion
disrupting presence aligns Benjamin’s essay with those themes
of dispersal and dissemination that characterise Derrida’s project in
such a way as to rethink the foundations of meaning in Western thought
(Derrida, 1976).
As the text puts it (quite presciently if we think of contemporary
audience theory in Media Studies): mechanical reproduction effects ‘the
liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’ (Benjamin,
1999a, p. 223). The text sees this effect as the most positive and most

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 Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction 371

revolutionary aspect of film as a medium, as the quintessential instance of

mechanically reproduced contemporary ‘art’. This succinct, precursive
statement anticipates the world of reception theories and audience theories
that locate meanings in the situations and contexts of social processes
rather than as hieratically inscribed in the texts ‘themselves’.5 It also
anticipates the poststructuralist idea that potentially mobile and multiple
meanings are stabilised in institutions through operations of power
(Foucault, 1988).
Several critical issues are raised here: the idea of the reproduction; the
distinction between the reproduction of an original and reproduction as the
very condition of production; the question of the authenticity of the object;
indeed, the question of the object-in-itself and its dispersal into different
contexts of sense-making, use and meaning. ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’ introduces themes that have dominated a
great deal of Western preoccupation with meaning, from the phenomen-
ology of Husserl to its philosophical and linguistic inheritors—that is,
from Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault to the whole domain of knowledge
that is Cultural Studies and Media Studies. The problematic that is opened
here concerns the domain of the symbolic: the idea of the object and its
stability, its authenticity and its dispersal through reproduction. This
concern runs parallel with the 20th century’s anxiety to explore the
fundamental sense-making structure of language, from de Saussure and
his commentators onwards. It is a concern that is haunted by the myriad
problems of the relations between signifier and signified, and troubled by
the Saussurian assertion that ‘it is the world of words that creates the
world of things’. Its consequence is the foregrounding of the social,
symbolic dimension of meaning and its central importance in various
discourses of knowledge and departments of existence (de Saussure,
1922).6
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ argues that
mechanical reproduction destroys the whole idea of authenticity that is
based on the idea of the unique singularity of the object. Using
photographic reproduction (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 226) as the defining
instance, the text explains how from a photographic negative can be made
several prints, so that to ask for an original makes no sense. This change,
the text continues, has the drastic effect of reversing the function of art. It
effects a liberation of art from ritual and determines its basis ‘in another
practice—politics’ (p. 218).7
The text also makes a claim about how film changes the very perception
of things:

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of

familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious
guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our
comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives, on the other hand,
it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our
taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished room,
our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up

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hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the
dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now in the midst of its far-flung
ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. With the
close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The
enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in
any case was visible, though unclear; it reveals entirely new structural
formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar
qualities of movement but reveals them in entirely unknown ones ‘which,
far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of
singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions’ [Rudolf Arnheim, Film
als Kunst, Berlin, 1932, p. 138]. Evidently a different nature opens itself
to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because unconsciously
penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.
Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows
nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The
act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is a familiar routine, yet we hardly
know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how
this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the
resources of its lowerings and liftings, it interruptions and isolations, its
extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera
introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to uncon-
scious impulses (pp. 229–230).

In this statement ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction’ defines the effect of the camera and the film. The camera is
the mechanism for introducing a new and hitherto unrealisable form of
knowledge in the domain of the visual. There is a strong sense of a
dangerous liberation in this formulation. Hence the references to bursting
the ‘prison world’ asunder and the ‘dynamite’ of the tenth of a second. An
explosive, revolutionary force is described in the text’s account of the
impact of this new technology on ways of seeing, as though that which
was hitherto shackled has been released and given a medium through
which it can be realised. In the last sentence, the text brings to mind
Freud’s ‘promethean discovery of the unconscious’ as it is implied that
our optical life enters into a new dimension with the coming of the camera
and the representations of film and the new forms of mass dissemination
they offer. In this case, it is the hitherto unconscious dimension of the
everyday world of social existence that comes into view and therefore is
open to scrutiny. It is in this sense that Benjamin’s account invites us to
review the very idea of the political.

‘THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL

REPRODUCTION’ AS AURATIC TEXT IN CULTURAL STUDIES
The reading offered above is partial and provisional, indicating a few
aspects of the text. As already indicated, however, the text does not stand
alone. As with the figure of Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’ is subject to a series of appropriations with
their own complex history. One aspect of this process of rereading and

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 Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction 373

determination is Benjamin’s association with Cultural Studies. The use of

Benjamin by Cultural Studies enables a fusion of Marxism, a concern with
the meaning of popular culture and an awareness of the effects of new
technologies of reproduction that affect the distribution and the
determination of texts and their meanings (Eagleton, 1981).
Benjamin proclaims the death of art while quietly, insistently but
scandalously celebrating the new domain of mass culture that has grown
out of the processes of industrialisation. This is a departure from the
cultural analysis of Marcuse and Adorno of the Frankfurt school who
berate popular culture (Marcuse, 1981; Adorno, 1991). For Benjamin the
loss of authenticity and aura brings with it the positive benefits of a new
kind of engagement and a new democracy of the popular. This shift
involves the transformation not just of modes of production but also of
modes of reception. This in turn implies a radical shift in the identity of
‘art’, its domain, and its claim to significance. Without knowing it,
Benjamin opens a position on popular culture—on the relations between
‘high art’ and popular culture—that is to become significant later in giving
rise to a new sense of the politics of culture, the politics of everyday life in
Cultural Studies. This series of discourses lays claim to ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and carries its argument into new
domains of knowledge (Ferris, 1996). Hence Benjamin is proclaimed as a
prescient harbinger of a new discourse of knowledge. With this shift in the
location of meaning from the hieratic to the popular, the movement of
Cultural Studies adopts, transposes and resignifies Benjamin (Barker,
2000).
One of the critically distinctive elements in Benjamin’s intellectual
aura—his received identity—is that he is a ‘Marxist’. Benjamin’s
Marxism has been critical in making his work of particular significance.
Without this grounding it is impossible to conceive of the text’s insistence
on connecting the idea of art with relations of production and its
concluding assertion that the aesthetic is inescapably political. At the same
time, Benjamin’s analysis goes beyond Marx. The Marxist element in
Benjamin’s thought allies ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ with the work of Gramsci and Althusser, both names that
signify attempts to rethink the Marxist account of superstructural relations,
both names that become similarly resignified in the emergence of Cultural
Studies. Benjamin’s account of culture similarly runs ‘against the grain’ of
conventional Marxist thought and its way of conceiving questions of
ideology, culture, practice and politics (Eagleton, 1986). It anticipates
post-structuralism, or at least the uses that Cultural Studies makes of what
it defines as ‘post-structuralism’ (Coward and Ellis, 1977).
Benjamin writes of what have become commonplace assumptions of
media theory within the discourses of Media Studies and Cultural Studies.
Of course, Benjamin precedes Baudrillard, Foucault, Screen film theory8,
and contemporary audience studies9. Nevertheless, ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is intelligible as opening a line of
thought within a fairly recently evolving tradition and clearly resonates
with these things (Ang, 1985, 1991, 1996; Baudrillard, 1983a, 1983b;

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374 N. Peim

Fiske, 1989a, 1989b; Lapsley and Westlake, 1988). It coincides—in terms

of its perspective, its interests, if not its time—with the self-conscious
awareness of the phenomena of perception and meaning that have been
characterised as both ‘the linguistic turn’ and as ‘the visual turn’.10
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, announces a
shift that means a change in the order of things far exceeding the aesthetic
sphere. The work of art is resituated within a series of fields—the field of
culture, of the social, of the political—in anticipation of a movement that
sees these fields increasingly as implicated in dynamic relations of
exchange. This discovery has powerful implications for questions about
modes of production, reproduction and archives, but also and equally
powerfully for modes of reception and interpretation and the status of
knowledge in its different forms.
Later, the heralds of postmodernism will also claim the name of
Benjamin as a harbinger of the new world order of technological/cultural
relations. There are good reasons for this adoption. Benjamin’s text sets
mechanically reproducible art, mass art, in effect, against the established
notion of the authentic work of art with its remote, mysterious and
inaccessible aura. It anticipates a number of trajectories, including the
rethinking of the relations between culture and the social formation. Under
the patrimony of Marx, the text emphasizes conditions of production and
reception of art—where art comes to stand as a metaphor for culture. This
explains why Benjamin is cited by those figures that appear at the birth
and infancy of Cultural Studies as a key thinker. Benjamin’s text enables
the Marxist critique to construct an expanded idea of culture—and the
adjacent ideas of a politics of representation and a politics of everyday
life—without resorting to the conventional tendency to negate popular
culture as the inferior product of a manipulating mass media industry
(Strinatti, 1995). Although necessarily ignorant of these future develop-
ments, Benjamin is prescient on a number of counts: in the claim that
popular cultural forms offer some kind of alternative domain to the
domain of art as hitherto considered; in the idea that what is significant
about this shift has more to do with modes of reception or use than with
objects-in-themselves; and in the final, resounding statement of ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ to the effect that
popular culture is political—radically distinguishing Benjamin from later
doom-merchants who see the disjuncture of the symbolic from the real via
technologies of reproduction in terms of a sinister new global order of
simulation (Baudrillard, 1983a, b; Virilio, 1998).
So it is that Benjamin gets ‘taken up’, becomes a cynosure for later
projects in the field of culture, as a kind of ‘heroic’ figure for an emerging
discourse in the process that identifies popular culture as a legitimate field
for research and the production of official kinds of knowledge (Strinatti,
1995). Clearly distinguished from contemporary critics of both right and
left in terms of his engagement with new forms of popular culture
engendered by new technologies of representation and reproduction
(Leavis, 1972; Eliot, 1951; Marcuse, 1964),11 Benjamin gets invoked to
lend his authorising weight to this emerging academic space (Eagleton,

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 Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction 375

1981). It is both Benjamin’s Marxism and his symbolic aura that have
made this essay so congenial to contemporary Cultural Studies.
Introspectively alert to the public world of objects and spaces, as his
arcade meanderings witness, Benjamin has particularly good credentials
for the newly emerging project of Cultural Studies. Benjamin’s displaced
self makes his work especially interesting in relation to the emerging
claim for a politics of identity through engagement with popular culture.12
How, then, might the significance of Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ for philosophy of education in the
age of digital reproduction be summarised? One way of approaching
this question is to cease to engage with Benjamin as an author—an
author ‘speaking’ (metaphysically loaded metaphor) or writing—to us, for
us—with the authority or aura of ‘genius’ (Foucault, 1977, 1988). If we
are to engage with his work in a different way, a certain fairly deeply
embedded (in ‘everyday’ discourses and in the more formal discourses
of education, for instance) approach to writing will have to be displaced
by a more grammatological attitude that refuses the seductive ideas
of language, presence, voice, self-expression and so on (Derrida, 1976,
1978, 1982, 1987). We are, after all, reading a text, a material entity
rather than communing with the self-presence of a voice and a
consciousness.
What Macherey does for literature and Foucault does for the author,
Benjamin does in reverse for popular culture (Macherey, 1978; Foucault,
1988). Macherey’s (later) Marxist account of literary production locates
the literary within a historically engendered set of social practices—and
highlights the uses of literature in relation to social reproduction in
education. Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ reminds of the historical
contingency of this idea in the first place and of the emergence of the
institutions and discourses that give life to and sustain the idea of literature
as a distinct domain of writing, undercutting its currency and deflating its
aura. Macherey’s Marxist inspired account of literary production
establishes the relation between the literary and social practices,
specifically in relation to the practices of schooling in the field of literacy
and the specialised, examinable techniques of textual analysis. Although
temporally prior, Benjamin’s thinking goes beyond Macherey’s in its
realisation of the domain of culture as radically altered, deconfigured and
reconfigured by socio-technological changes in modes of production and
representation. Clearly, this process must be massively accelerated by the
rapidity and extent that digital forms of reproduction allow (Demac,
1990).
This is what makes Benjamin appear as postmodern. The ‘work of art’
comes to stand as a metaphor for culture. Culture is reconceived in terms
of social symbolic practice—as against the traditional articulation of
subject (artist), object (work) and, in an altogether other space, audience.
This is the road that leads, through film theory, to contemporary audience
theory, which dislodges the idea of text and form as bearers of monologic
meanings (Lapsley and Westlake, 1988). This also corresponds with the
‘end’ of grand narratives of enlightenment through exposure to culture

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376 N. Peim

within shared public communicative spaces, even while such grand

narratives increasingly inform key elements of public education. Cultural
objects and meanings are political, contested and agonistic on this view.13
The implications for this movement in the field of education are
powerful—the articulation of perspectives that change with technologies
of reproduction that effect a decentring of meaning are fundamental to
ideas about the production of knowledge in discourses. We can also see
how in arguments about the importance of ‘Literature and the arts’ in
education certain texts appear (and reappear) as being of value without
need to refer to where this value may reside, independently of any
references to a radically altered textual field. Such texts have acquired
established, hieratic status. References to such texts require little or no
justification since they are already accorded the special aura of
significance that derives from their canonical status.14
Digital reproduction both accelerates and shifts processes of textual of
reproduction. Digital reproduction might be said to open up new spaces,
social relations and domains of textual play. It affects the appearance of a
new textual ontology. In the age of digital reproduction, material moves in
different circuits at high speed. Virtual centres gather textual material
together and offer new combinations and opportunities and modes of
access. Access is dispersed and distributed anew. Models of inert
consumption are displaced by models of active engagement. If anything,
the significance of Benjamin’s essay is accentuated and renewed by digital
reproduction.15
In relation to this shifting and dynamic textual field, we may consider,
for example, models of textual practice that inhabit English, the subject
that remains at the core of the National Curriculum in England. While
Media Studies and Cultural Studies have developed traditions of knowing
and understanding the textual field in radically different ways, English has
remained tied to a significant degree to a model of literature that is
predicated on the idea of a canonical heritage to a large extent (see Peim,
2003). It is as if the question of aura had never arisen. The applications of
social theory to questions about significance, culture and meaning—a
range of techniques for approaching textual content, opening up the very
question of content and value—have been eschewed by the formal
institutionalized version of the subject, even while its advocates in the UK,
in Australia, in South Africa and in the USA have proposed a more
inclusive conception of subject identity. English remains the core subject
in the National Curriculum in the business of textual relations; but it
remains strongly classified in terms of its dedication to a defined body of
texts that carry the aura of what properly belongs to the subject.

CONCLUSION
It is possible to read ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ as a treatise on the status of certain kinds of knowledge—as
a critique of the mystique of hieratic knowledge. On this reading, the text

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 Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction 377

asks what happens when knowledge appears in forms that appear to be

outside of the more priestly, guarded practices of the academy. Some kind
of scandal always attaches to the move away from the conventional forms
of knowledge into the domains of the everyday and popular: hence
‘discourses of derision’ are generated around upstart disciplines such as
Media Studies and Cultural Studies where artefacts or practices of popular
culture come within the ambit of the academic (see Peim and McDougall,
2007). For ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
though, the issue of the provenance of art—which might stand as
metaphor or metonym for what is granted authority in the field of culture
and knowledge—is utterly political.
The celebratory note of the conclusion of ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’, however, though rhetorically powerful and
enticing, needs to be approached with care, if not caution. ‘The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ announces the idea of ‘aura’,
an idea that now, through the historical distance at which Benjamin stands,
invests both the text and the figure of Benjamin with an excess of
significances. Aura, it seems, is not a feature of art, culture or knowledge
that can be simply eradicated. Aura always returns.
The domain of the education in its relations with knowledge cannot exist
independently of what we might now refer to as a politics of aura, a politics
of the symbolic meanings and their social cultural resonances that attach to
certain objects and fields of knowledge such as canonical texts, works of art,
established bodies of knowledge that are embedded in curricula. This essay
has argued that the case of Walter Benjamin and the text ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ can be read as exemplifying issues
regarding the foundations of such knowledge. The case of Walter Benjamin
can serve, perhaps, as a reminder that the objects of knowledge are not self-
announcing entities, that curricula are always works of production and
reproduction, that our sense of what are significant objects of discourse will
itself shift through changes in technologies and changing frameworks of
sense-making. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
perhaps alerts us to the interminable process of rethinking that is involved in
engagements with knowledge.

Correspondence: Nick Peim, School of Education, University of

Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
E-mail: n.a.peim@bham.ac.uk

NOTES
1. Heidegger would eschew the subject-object divide by positing the historically located nature of
human being as Dasein. See Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962).
2. Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition is particularly concerned to define significant shifts in the
grounds of knowledge.
3. The organisations in questions are NATE (National Association for the Teaching of English),
AATE (The Australian Association for the Teaching of English) and NCTE (National Council
for the Teaching of English).
4. The essay was written in 1936.

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378 N. Peim

5. Terry Eagleton notes this ‘prescient’ quality (Eagleton, 1981). Benjamin’s work strikingly
prefigures many of the motifs of post-structuralism.
6. De Saussure famously proposes the idea of ‘a science that studies the life of signs within
society’.
7. The text refers to ‘graduated and hierarchized mediation’ in relation to the reception of
paintings and the development of a ‘public’. Earlier, the text has drawn our attention
to the change in perception wrought by Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is
likened to the effect of the film on our awareness of the ‘entire spectrum of the optical’
(p. 237).
8. In the influential British journal, Screen, film theory became highly elaborate, drawing on a range
of disciplines including psychoanalysis, anthropology, semiotics and linguistics, and very much
concerned with the politics of representation.
9. Audience studies arose in the mid-1980s as a movement within Media Studies and Cultural
Studies away from concerns with the intrinsic properties and meanings of texts towards a
concern with how texts and media were actually being read and made sense of and with the ways
that texts and media formed significant elements in the lived experiences of their users. Pre-
eminent theorists were Ien Ang (1985, 1991) and John Fiske (1989a; 1989b). Ang’s Watching
Dallas (1985) was something of a founding statement.
10. Concerns about perception, meaning and representation might be characterised as having two
main strands: one is the phenomenological tradition in philosophy initiated by Husserl; the other
is the linguistics that follows from de Saussure. These two strands combine particularly in the
work of Derrida.
11. Different perspectives, from both right and left: common denunciations of popular culture as
eroding values.
12. Benjamin stands (in so many ways!) opposed to the later Heidegger’s pastoral-mystical
tendencies: as the cosmopolitan, knowing wanderer in the arcade, displaced person in exile from
exile. Heidegger invokes a mystical return to an attentiveness to Being, while Benjamin is
immersed in the detailed historical engagement with very contemporary beings.
13. This description drastically reduces the difference between Lyotard’s agonistic postmodern
condition and Habermas’s idea of public communication and the necessary continuation of the
modernist collective project.
14. In a recent discussion of moral and ethical issues in relation to ‘literature and the arts’ David Carr
and Robert Davis present an argument that considers difficulties that may arise in relation to the
specific moral or ethical properties of texts. In doing so, they never question the identity of texts
that appear within the category of art and never consider the nature of that categorisation. Their
concluding statement indicates the extent to which their argument remains firmly within a
framework that accepts the accrued value of ‘works of art’ that are, in the structure of the essay,
to be distinguished from works of popular culture: ‘the moral and spiritual status of
Shakespeare’s King Lear, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Goya’s Saturn or Wagner’s
The Ring is surely not something to be determined on political grounds alone (at any rate, on any
narrow construal of ‘‘political’’), and such works ought not to be ruled educationally out or in
according to whether they are at odds with the sensitivities of particular individuals or
communities. On the contrary, the fact that they are so at odds may well be the best educational
reason for ruling them in.’ We may ponder on the phrase ‘at odds with the sensitivities of
particular individuals or communities’ and how this might resonate if the word ‘sensitivities’
were replaced with the word ‘sensibilities’. The idea of the socio-cultural status of textual
material does not get addressed in this paper that clearly takes for granted the intrinsic, hieratic
value of the cited texts. Their essay is full of such automatic references to established canonical
texts (Carr and Davis, 2007).
15. This is demonstrated in some small way by the fact that ‘The Work of Art . . .’ is available
online: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

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