Walter Benjamin , a philosopher and literary critic, rarely recognized among sociologists, was in fact a pioneer in the analysis and study of phenomena related to changes in aesthetic enjoyment and the role of mass media in exploring nascent modernity. He followed a logical thread that continues to be relevant today in interpreting postmodernity. In his reflections, disseminated throughout a vast and diverse literary production spanning diverse genres and fields, he forged a series of categories, still relevant today, for understanding the complexity of the then emerging society, between the 800th and 900th centuries, at the dawn of the birth of mass media . The historical-social genesis of this process of change is also of great interest, from an "archaeological" perspective on the media.
Constellations of the present
For Benjamin, it is of fundamental importance not only how these media organize "perception" and sensory sensitivities, which he will then find Marshall McLuhan as epigones, but also their expressive potential in reinterpreting the past, condensing the ancient and the modern into the "now-time," not in a logic of linear development but rather as constellations of the present. In this sense, the new media, by hybridizing, generate new "revelations" of reality.Aura"and "shock” are certainly among Benjamin's best-known categories on media theory, which introduced the idea that the “medium” is everything that is capable of act on perception, analyzing different media, from photography, to cinema, to radio, to the telephone, to the press, up to language itself.
The reproducibility of art
The concept of “aura,” already present in the essay “ A Brief History of Photography ,” was later made famous in “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction .” The essay, written in multiple versions, was published in 1936 by the “ Journal of Social Research ,” an umbrella organization of the Frankfurt School , with which Benjamin collaborated and of which he was an exponent, albeit with some distinctions. Contrary to the School's negative connotation of the culture industry , Benjamin saw the possibilities of reproducibility offered by new techniques as opportunities for the nascent mass society to approach art and its aestheticizing experiences. The “technical” medium separates the work from the viewer, according to categories of distance/remoteness, thus forming the concept of an indistinct public.
Between Simmel and Bauman
In “ Passage-Werk” (an unfinished work on the Passages of Paris, on which he worked between 1927 and 1940, described by Theodor Adorno as Benjamin's masterpiece), he describes the 19th century with the modernity of the metropolis as a true social factory where the extraction of value takes place in the streets (emblematic, in this sense, is the figure of the flâneur who intercepts a line that leads from Simmel's blasé to figures such as, for example, the tourist, the pilgrim, and the vagabond analyzed by Bauman in “ The Society of Uncertainty ”). The city, as a miniature of society, is a factory producing phantasmagoria through the world of commodities, turning the market into a cosmos and creating “mythology” that is the archaic cipher of modernity, interpreted precisely as myth. The labyrinth, a metaphor for the metropolis, where the Minotaur is the citizen half-man and half-commodity , recalls the same bewilderment of the individual in the current liquid society of postmodernity.
The aesthetic value of the goods
In the wake of Simmel's thought, which identified the metropolis as a miniature model of Western civilization between the 800th and 900th centuries , one of the categories forged by Benjamin is certainly that of " phantasmagoria ." Already used by Marx in " Capital " to describe the commodification of relationships in terms of economic categories, use value and exchange value, Benjamin identifies goods as having a primarily aesthetic value, relating to the rapid flow of images that permeate contemporary life. This fruitful line of thought leads to Baudrillard 's world of objects , and his concepts of simulacrum and simulation , and to Morin's ethics of leisure , which sees the emergence of consumption as the birth of new forms of knowledge and sensibility and the birth of an " aesthetic and profane culture that produces mythology ."
Walter Iolandi
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