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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
Epilogue
The growing proletarianization of modern man
and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process.
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without
affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.
Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but
instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change
property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving
property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics
into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its
Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in
the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual
values.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate
in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on
the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This
is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may
be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's
technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without
saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments.
Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:
For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled
against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic... Accordingly we state:...
War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated
machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers,
and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization
of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow
with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines
the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench
of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new
architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights,
the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others... Poets and artists
of Futurism!... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that
your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art... may be illumined
by them!
This manifesto has the virtue of clarity.
Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter,
the aesthetics of today's war appears as follows: If the natural utilization
of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in
technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for
an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness
of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate
technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed
to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of
imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous
means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of
production - in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic
war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of 'human
material,' the claims to which society has denied its natural material.
Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of
trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary
bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new
way.
'Fiat ars - pereat mundus,' says Fascism,
and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification
of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently
the consummation of 'l'art pour l'art.' Mankind, which in Homer's
time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for
itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience
its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is
the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism
responds by politicizing art. |