Hamming it Up

Walter Benjamin's argument in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is clearly addressing the fluctuations in ritual, authenticity, and thereby, aesthetics in the field of cultural production after steam power and electricity. But the underlying stakes of the argument determine the possibility of a "mass art" under the looming threat of Fascism. The inevitable war Benjamin references in a sweeping, if not exaggerated claim, "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" seems to be a clash on the level of the cultural more than political or economic, which, in turn, renders the propaganda machine that cinema threatens to be an instrument of both enslavement and emancipation of, for lack of a better term, the masses. Cinema, as a market force and a proselytizing agent excites and terrifies him, but in either respect the model seems to reflect the top-down production of mass culture; government or corporation wealth usually allows this artform to exist, and a widespread audience is assumed throughout.

With this in mind, the naivety of Marconi's model of radio seems all the more glaring. Despite an inherently integrated form of production, Marconi's wireless was imagined as a bureaucratic tool and not a mediation of producer and consumer. My question here is: How would Benjamin's ambivalence towards the form of mass cinema play out in the realm of the disconnected voice of the wireless radio, since Marconi's vision lacks the widespread appeal for either pole of Benjamin's ambition.

The case of ham radio enthusiasts mitigates this tension somewhat as an example of what we may now call "grassroots" media consumption that expands the scope of audience while not necessarily creating a "war of art." With some amount of foresight, the Radio Act of 1912 restricted radiowaves to "200 metres of less" despite the pleas of the operators that "We have been brought up with the idea that the air was absolutely free to everyone" (Burke and Briggs, 157). The ability to forge a community of listeners still persisted which made these ham operators into the first radio "pirates", and in many ways this clash in still being played out today with the anti-copyright promotion of "net neutrality". But what really links Benjamin's dialectic and the hams is the apparent lack of context they brought to their hobby, being an audience for "who were totally uninterested in the the content of the messages picked up, radio was a sport" (Burke and Briggs, 162). Benjamin encounters this same uneasy middleground when answering critics of film as an art form: "Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise...[meeting] this mode of reception halfway" (Benjamin, 240). An absent minded aesthetics seems not to be entirely pejorative for Benjamin but almost a way to approach art unideologically, thereby depoliticizing art, undoing the conundrum of automatic war, for increasingly automatized societies.