Walter Benjamin was not only a philosopher of history and memory; he was also one of the twentieth century’s most subtle thinkers on aesthetics. But for Benjamin, art was never just about beauty or culture in the narrow sense. It was inseparable from politics—not only in terms of content, but in terms of structure, experience, and perception. He understood that how we see the world is already a political matter.
Benjamin's reflections on art and media—particularly in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)—interrogate the ways in which political power and aesthetic form intersect, overlap, and sometimes fuse into each other. His concern was not just how politics influences aesthetics, but how politics itself can become aestheticized—and how this process can either liberate or dominate.
Mechanical Reproduction and the Shattering of Aura
At the heart of Benjamin’s aesthetics is the concept of the aura—that unique, unrepeatable presence of a work of art embedded in a particular time and place. A painting in a cathedral, a sculpture in a shrine—these works once carried a kind of ritual authority. They could not be owned, copied, or distributed. They demanded reverence.
But with modern technologies—photography, film, sound recording—art becomes reproducible. Its aura is shattered. Art becomes portable, democratized, stripped of its traditional cult value. This, Benjamin argued, is not merely a technical shift; it is a political one. The potential of mechanical reproduction lies in its capacity to strip art of its elitism, to bring images and narratives to the masses, to transform passive spectators into active participants.
Cinema, in particular, fascinated Benjamin because it fragmented perception and disrupted traditional narrative form. Unlike the still contemplation of a painting, film bombarded the viewer with rapid cuts, montage, and discontinuities. This shock, he believed, could awaken new forms of perception—sharpening attention, destabilizing assumptions, making the familiar strange.
Fascism and the Aestheticization of Politics
Yet the same technologies that democratized art could also be turned toward reactionary ends. In a famous passage, Benjamin warns that “fascism seeks to give the masses a chance to express themselves” while withholding real political power. Instead of transforming society, it turns politics into spectacle—into ritual, style, and theatricality. It substitutes emotional identification for rational critique, myth for argument, choreography for agency.
This is the aestheticization of politics: the transformation of politics into a work of art. Fascist rallies, uniforms, symbols, slogans, mass choreography—these were not incidental to the fascist project; they were its lifeblood. They made submission feel like transcendence, hierarchy feel like harmony, violence feel sublime.
For Benjamin, this was the perversion of aesthetics: to make destruction beautiful, and to substitute collective catharsis for emancipation.
The Politicization of Art
In response, Benjamin proposed the inverse: not the aestheticization of politics, but the politicization of art. This does not mean propaganda or didacticism. Rather, it means art that awakens, interrupts, challenges—art that refuses to serve as decoration for domination.
Revolutionary art, for Benjamin, reveals the cracks in the surface of things. It calls attention to the constructed nature of reality, to the fractures in history, to the voices silenced by the official narrative. It disorients in order to reorient. It transforms perception not to manipulate, but to liberate.
Photography and film, when used critically, could become tools of political awakening—making visible what is normally concealed, offering new angles on old truths, slowing time down enough for reflection to take hold.
A Legacy of Vigilance and Possibility
Walter Benjamin’s insight into the aesthetic dimension of politics remains powerfully relevant in a world saturated by images, performances, and emotional spectacle. From campaign ads to viral videos, from nationalist pageantry to the marketing of identity, the lines between politics and aesthetics continue to blur.
Benjamin teaches us to ask difficult but essential questions: What feelings are being orchestrated? What is being made to seem natural, inevitable, or heroic? What kind of seeing is being trained?
In a time when politics increasingly operates through sensation, style, and simulation, Benjamin’s work calls for a counter-aesthetics: one that disrupts, disenchants, and demands critical engagement. For him, the future of freedom may depend on how we see—and on whether art can still help us see otherwise.
Next article: Adorno on Nonidentity, Suffering, and the Refusal of Reconciliation
