I think that if Benjamin had lived much longer he would have made significant revisions to the theories he offers in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This is not the place for a general critique, but attempting connect some of the ideas of that essay to my experiences in the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum has, I think, helped me begin to understand why I find this essay so frustrating compared to everything else I’ve read by Benjamin. The problem is that even if you maintain that his description of the authenticity or aura of an art work can or should be read phenomenologically rather than metaphysically (which I do), Benjamin’s analysis still depends on a strong historical concept of authenticity. The most clear and important symptom of this can be found in his distinctions between ritual and politics, and between fetish and value.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to work through the rest of what I’d like to say about this, and what I think it has to do with the Kinemathek Museum, but it has turned out to require a lot more time and space than I can give it for a blog post. It may become part of my project, as both Benjamin and the concept of ritual are central to that, but we will see. In short, however, there is something really interesting about the way in which the museum begins with the hall of mirrors. This replicates the viewing subject infinitely in a way not unlike (though perhaps obverse to) the universalized perspective of the movie screen. From here I want to argue that Benjamin is wrong about the inherent criticality (or ironic distance) of a film viewer, and bring in some argument from Adorno’s theory of the culture industry to show how through mainstream film we are hypnotized by our own image of our own desires (which have themselves only been produced and magnified previously by this same and adjacent processes).

This might require a little more Freud and Lacan (or Deleuze and Guattari!) than I have time or desire for at the moment, but hopefully this post will at least serve as a reminder to follow through with this later.