The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Jstor

This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data.

On Mon I participated in a roundtable discussing Walter Benjamin'south essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility"/"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Rereading this essay after not having looked at it in five years or so, I was struck past the degree to which Benjamin anticipated (or, better, laid the groundwork for) both the rhetoric and the analytic procedures of contemporary historicist literary criticism and cultural studies: coordinating big social-structural changes with changes in artistic genres and artistic values; attending to popular culture alongside high culture; and, particularly, announcing the imperative to "politicize art." This is not quite as banal as might seem—after all, Benjamin was not an academic, and this famous essay is not a piece of work of literary criticism or of philology. Anyway it made me want to call back more most the reception history of this essay.

I had wanted to bring to that roundtable a couple of quick factoids from that reception history using JSTOR's archive of scholarly journals. I didn't quite manage the nice handout I envisioned, just as I put together my remarks I gathered a little data, so this post relates the explorations I made.

Using the JSTOR Information for Research interface, I downloaded metadata for all JSTOR items (articles, book reviews, etc.) that included one of the post-obit strings (case-insensitive):

• walter benjamin
• work of fine art in the age of its technological reproducibility
• work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

With the help of scripts I'd adult earlier, I compared the frequency of items with these strings in them over time. (N.B. None of these search strings is a perfect indicator of the entity it appears to refer to. Benjamin is often chosen just "Benjamin," but automatically disambiguating the Benjamin from all the Benjamins of the earth is no simple chore. And the two essay titles, because they are equanimous of many tokens, have, I'd presume, a higher probability of beingness distorted by OCR errors equally well as a lower "natural" [Zipf'due south police] probability of occurrence.)

Here are the totals:

          walter benjamin all items: 8200; articles: 5006                  

          work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction all items: 410; articles: 353                  

          piece of work of fine art in the historic period of its technological reproducibility all items: 111; articles: 97                  

Every bit information technology turns out, the alternate essay titles are co-mentioned in only a handful of items, and so the total number of mentions of either English language championship is

          Either English language championship of "The Piece of work of Art..." all items: 517; manufactures: 447                  

The sheer number of these mentions (and their steady increase over fourth dimension, equally nosotros'll run across below) gives an indication that Benjamin's essay is canonical for scholarship, a recurrent point of reference. To appreciate what this ways qualitatively, you could notice that in the essay's latest English version, at the head of a volume of selected writings on media, the first mention of Marx receives an explanatory note (Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Fine art in the Historic period of Its Technological Reproducibility," in The Piece of work of Fine art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media [Cambridge: Harvard, 2008], 43n. 2). But you could also track the essay'southward continuing ascent in mentions over fourth dimension:

(I have divided each yearly count by the total number of items in JSTOR for that year, which of course likewise increases with time, to give a sense of the essay's increasing share of attending.)

It is also continuously important though not dominant in the reception of Benjamin'due south œuvre, which we can run across by comparing the frequency of items mentioning "Walter Benjamin" to those mentioning his essay:

Another way to do this comparison is to wait at the ratio of these two frequencies with a smoothing line added:

Though "The Work of Art" is of import in Benjamin'southward reception, The Arcades Projection has caught upward over time:

Notwithstanding, there is i "Work of Art" -mentioner for every 10 to 20 "Walter Benjamin"-mentioners in almost years from 1970 onwards. That strikes me as a fairly substantial representation in Benjamin-reception for a single short essay known all-time equally part of Illuminations.

For comparison, I chose more or less at random another critical anecdote of "theory" from roughly the aforementioned menstruum, "The Intentional Fallacy." Though items mentioning "intentional fallacy" are about x times more frequent than items with "work of art in the historic period of mechanical reproduction," this term does not show the upward trend of Benjamin's works in JSTOR:

Thus this preliminary analysis indicates the scope of Benjamin'south influence in the journals archived by JSTOR, and the prominence of "The Work of Art" within it.

Then far, then unproblematic, yet there is a non-Benjaminian lesson to describe here, I think. The reception of Benjamin'south work tells a dissimilar story about culture in the "age of technical reproducibility" than the essay itself does. Benjamin's essay posits a transformation in the nature of the artwork resulting from the conditions of technical reproducibility. For Benjamin, this transformation entails at least two things. First, the disuse of aureola, which, he claims, eliminates "all semblance of art's autonomy" (28). Second, the opportunity for revolutionary intellectuals to "politicize art," dialectically reversing fascism'southward aestheticization of politics (42). I believe the appeal of these two moves in literary studies since the 1970s has had to do with their overestimation of the power of the private critical-interpretive act. Benjamin performs a stunning leap from noting a broad (and dubious: every bit everyone knows, impress reproducibility is not a nineteenth-century innovation) technological transformation to a merits almost changing cultural values; this same jump allows him to claim political urgency for a discussion of aesthetics. And this gesture of politicizing art has go familiar, fifty-fifty ritualized, in literary and cultural criticism.

What has dropped out of the moving picture is precisely the long chain of mediating processes between the technologies of cultural reproduction and the many domains of values and judgments (artful, cultural, political…). What kind of mediating processes? Processes like (in the instance of texts) publishing and republishing, reviewing, canonization, re-reading, disquisitional appreciation and appropriation. These are not processes of re-product except in a very broad sense. They are, rather, processes of cultural product (of meanings, of further texts, of status, even of…the "semblance of [relative] autonomy"). To follow Benjamin's emphasis on reproducibility and its relation to the singular artwork is to obscure an equally consequential transformation: the concluding century'south massive increase in the number and diversity of cultural products. At that place are more and more photographs, songs, novels…and scholarly articles. (Film production does not increment as dramatically, however.) the world of scholarship does witnesses this increase:

At that place are hundreds of scholarly responses to "The Piece of work of Art…," thousands of scholarly texts that mention Benjamin'due south name in JSTOR-digitized print. This is not an account of the piece of work of fine art in the age of mechanical reproduction. It is "The Work of Fine art" in the age of technically facilitated cultural production on an unprecedented and ever-increasing scale.

Cantankerous-posted on Arcade.

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Source: https://andrewgoldstone.com/blog/2013/03/29/wb/