Benjamin

What did he see as contemporary ways of thinking about media?  

Benjamin describes “first society” – primitive society – and its technology as a society whose technology existed only in fusion with ritual and which technology could therefore only require depictions which were notations of humans and their environments.  This technology’s orientation was different than that of the second technology and of his contemporary technology in that the first technology makes maximum possible use of human beings.  (I thought of this a bit differently than Benjamin.  I’d give technology’s design more of a direct cause & effect over its usage:  The maximum use of humans was a function of the technology’s design.) 

On the other hand, Benjamin describes “second technology” as minimizing its use of human beings.  (To that, I’d add that we are the makers and users of that technology and are therefore designing the minimal use of human beings – and creating or adding to a Utopian notion of technology.)   

The move to the use of the second technology occurred when human beings first began to distance themselves from nature:  “It lies, in other words, in play.”  He acknowledges that “seriousness and play” (and “rigor and license”) are “implied in every work of art...and this implies that art is linked to both the second and the first technologies.”  However, he says that one cannot make a jump, “describe[ing] the goal of the second technology as ‘mastery over nature’…since this implies viewing the second technology from the standpoint of the first.”  

Benjamin seems to be pointing to his contemporaries’ view of art as arising from a need to master nature and of technology (media) as producing art that makes maximum use of humans.  This view of art and technology seems to be problematic for Benjamin because: 

1/ it doesn’t expose and explore and exploit (“rehearse” is his word) the “interplay” that occurs between nature and humanity and

2/ it doesn’t expose and remove the users’ notion that they are beholden (he uses the word “enslaved”) to technology (because we are indeed not) and that we are indeed free of technology “when humanity’s whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free.” 

Benjamin also seems to indicate that a prevailing contemporary theory existed that saw art and media as non-political or as being less political than it is.  For Benjamin, photography hides its “political significance” but that political significance still exists and therefore, it “demands a specific kind of reception.  Free floating contemplation is no appropriate to them [photographs].” Because they “unsettle the viewer, he feels challenged to find a particular way to approach them.”  I saw Benjamin describing art and technology as politically active in several different ways: 

1/ Modern art and technology has as a core, inherent quality that it has a “capacity for improvement…and this capability is linked to its radical renunciation of eternal value” (with eternal value being that the only thing that Greeks were able to strive for.)  When this striving for eternal value is gone or diminished, the potential for the art’s political action is unearthed. 

2/ Literary competence is now common because of “the distinction between author and public loses its axiomatic character….at any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer…work itself is given a voice.”  Literary competence has moved from being a closely-protected advantage and power play by the ruling class and spread into the (non-ruling class) masses. 

3/ Modern art objects, because of their technologically-enabled reproducibility, can produce “simultaneous reception” and provide viewers with the means to regulate their own responses therefore have an available organizing power. 

4/ The masses benefit from the second technology and the second technology allows the masses to own it.  When this happens, when the masses own the technology, they see that which has been kept from them and that knowledge often incites political action. 

Benjamin seems to also be arguing against contemporary views that these technologies and art were/are rhetorically neutral and that understanding the products of that technology (art) could be done passively, without investment  and criticality by the viewer of the art.  He does so by simply arguing that the technologies produce text or the need for text (in the case of photographs, captions and in the case of film, sequencing of images) and that produced text itself is different (“it is clear that they [captions] have a character altogether different from the titles of paintings”) and cannot be rhetorically neutral or viewed without considering the rhetoric it is producing.  While I don’t see Benjamin as making this jump, wouldn’t the next step in this logic be that (therefore) the technology that produced it is also not rhetorically neutral? 

Benjamin seems to be telling his contemporaries that they are in denial about the rise of mass media or that they are attempting to suppress mass media – with the suppression actually being a class and elitist warfare even if it is rationalized and operates under the auspices as being good for the masses and societal structure.  Even when Benjamin is making a different, distinct point that film (the technology) “penetrates” reality (whereas other, earlier technologies did not) and the penetrated reality that is displayed by film is “incomparably the more significant for people of today,” he seems to go back to this “wake-up” call to his contemporaries when, in the middle of that point about the way film displays reality he says “it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art.”

What did he consider here as media?

His contemporary media:  Film; Photography, Graphic art, flyers, captions accompanying photographs

Ancient/historical media:  lithographs, printing press, castings, stampings.