The name of Walter Benjamin came up in our conversation, between Mikael and me, last Monday, about cultural capital. Specifically, we mentioned his essay, The Author as Producer (1934)
You can download Benjamin’s essay, here
https://monoskop.org/images/9/93/Benjamin_Walter_1934_1999_The_Author_as_Producer.pdf
Benjamin was writing at a particular moment in history and describing the the consequences of technological change in relation to cultural production. He was particularly interested in how mechanical reproduction would transform access to the production print culture. His essay was published just as the popular-front politics of 1930s Europe began to take a turn for the worse. So, his writing has an engaging urgency that resonates with our present-day circumstances.
Mostly, he was considering writers and journalists; but his comments are just as important in relation to the developments in visual culture and graphic design. Also, what Benjamin was describing was the beginning of a process that has accelerated and become more significant through the shift from print culture to the digital stream of always-on and dynamic communication.
The characteristics of mass-production, economy and distribution, were identified by Benjamin as culturally transformative. He believed that the entrenched gate-keepers of culture would be swept aside and that a new and dynamic political association between workers and artists would emerge. Nowadays, this sounds a bit idealistic. I would say that Benjamin underestimated the resilience of the dominant culture. Having said that, there have been successive moments when cultural production was transformed, and became more widely available.
Benjamin is an important historical figure and is widely recognised as a key personality in the development of cultural theory. His unfinished Arcades Project has been hugely influential in the consideration of urbanism and modernist experience of the accelerated city. Perhaps his most famous work is, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).
The distinction between high art and popular culture is deeply entrenched in the social fabric. But, it is a false distinction based on out-dated notions of cultural capital. Benjamin was amongst the first to describe popular cultural forms seriously and was a founder of the Frankfurt School of cultural theory. The Frankfurt School was probably the most widely influential philosophical movement if the 20C, and has transformed our understanding of popular culture and its significance.
In France, Roland Barthes used this approach to describe, through journalism, the important cultural products of the age. His book, Mythologies (1957) provided the template for the serious consideration of popular cultural forms.
If you are interested in this, consider the impact of technology on popular music over the last 70 years…The BBC have made a series of excellent documentaries that describe how this played out in relation to making and recording pop music.