Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The Frankfurt School 69
One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced
object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it
substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction
to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates
the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering
of tradition . . . Their most powerful agent is film. Its social significance, particularly
in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect,
that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage (223).
The ‘aura’ of a text or practice is its sense of ‘authenticity’, ‘authority’, ‘autonomy’
and ‘distance’. The decay of the aura detaches the text or practice from the authority
and rituals of tradition. It opens them to a plurality of reinterpretation, freeing them to
be used in other contexts, for other purposes. No longer embedded in tradition,
significance is now open to dispute; meaning becomes a question of consumption,
an active (political), rather than a passive (for Adorno: psychological) event. Technological
reproduction changes production: ‘To an ever greater degree the work of art
reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility’ (226). Consumption
is also changed: from its location in religious ritual to its location in the rituals of
aesthetics, consumption is now based on the practice of politics. Culture may have
become mass culture, but consumption has not become mass consumption.
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The
reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction
toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterised by the direct,
intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the
expert (236).
Questions of meaning and consumption shift from passive contemplation to active
political struggle. Benjamin’s celebration of the positive potential of ‘mechanical reproduction’,
his view that it begins the process of a move from an ‘auratic’ culture to a
‘democratic’ culture in which meaning is no longer seen as unique, but open to question,
open to use and mobilization, has had a profound (if often unacknowledged)
influence on cultural theory and popular culture. Susan Willis (1991) describes
Benjamin’s essay thus: ‘This may well be the single most important essay in the development
of Marxist popular culture criticism’ (10). Whereas Adorno locates meaning in
the mode of production (how a cultural text is produced determines its consumption
and significance), Benjamin suggests that meaning is produced at the moment of consumption;
significance is determined by the process of consumption, regardless of the
mode of production. As Frith points out, the ‘debate’ 11 between Adorno and Benjamin
– between a socio-psychological account of consumption combined with an insistence
on the determining power of production, against the argument that consumption is
a matter of politics – continues to be argued in contemporary accounts of popular
music: ‘Out of Adorno have come analyses of the economics of entertainment . . . [and
the] ideological effects of commercial music making. . . . From Benjamin have come