AS I explained two days ago, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was fully aware of Germany’s Conservative Revolutionary movement and, in particular, the ideas of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Otto Strasser (1897-1974). At the same time, he would have done well to acquaint himself with the work of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), not least with regard to the latter’s damning analysis of technology. Caught, as he was, with one foot in Germany’s romantic past and the other aboard the emerging cultural bandwagon of early twentieth-century film, Benjamin’s own thoughts on technology remain extremely naive and contradictory.

During the course of his most well-known essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), in which he argued that artistic expression was becoming devalued by the process of mass replication, Benjamin rightly observed that technology leads to the impoverishment of authentic experience and yet went on to suggest that technology itself can become an effective medium for socio-economic liberation. When he came to discuss the Marxist historian, Eduard Fuchs (1870-1940), for example, who was also a famous collector, Benjamin claimed that people had been dehumanised by a “bungled reception of technology” and that it had led to a systematic anaesthetisation of the human sensory faculties.

This anaesthetisation, he continued, had a secondary impact in terms of desensitising the manner in which people ordinarily interpret the most brutal and inhumane conditions associated with capitalist production. Ironically, Benjamin insisted that the reproductive potential of modern cinema – centred around its careful use of assembled montage, rather than a reliance on the fixed photography of the past – could radically alter our sensory capacities and move them in a more revolutionary direction. This was something that Benjamin wholeheartedly embraced and his idea that artistic reproduction diminishes the value of something by removing it from its more genuine context, i.e. that in which it originally appeared, fundamentally changes the manner in which it is able to transmit cultural tradition:

“The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it.”

In other words, Benjamin adopted a decidedly anti-traditional approach in that technology was interpreted as a convenient medium to uproot something from its origins:

“For the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionised. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.”

It is clear that what Benjamin was proposing was the total destruction of all tradition as a means of clearing the way for a technological socialist revolution, but the potential for technology to enslave people en masse had already been harnessed by the very capitalism that Benjamin sought to overthrow. That which he described as a “bungled reception,” therefore, may have been a belated expression of personal frustration at the fact that Soviet Russia – and particularly the communist films of Sergei Eisenstein and others – had already been pipped to the post by the West. The results, of course, were exactly the same and Benjamin’s intention to eradicate cultural tradition in accordance with his leftist ideology was, instead, carried out under the auspices of Hollywood. Not in the name of socialism, of course, but certainly in the long-term pursuit of profit.

As Spengler demonstrated, by evolving into a religion that is far more dangerous than that of Marx and Engels, the impact of technology is such that man “is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him – forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not – to follow its course.” It is here that Benjamin’s attempt to utilise technology on behalf of Marxism begins to resemble Faust’s efforts to forge a pact with the Devil.