Episode #152 - The Frankfurt School - Walter Benjamin Pt. 1
Episode 152 - The Frankfurt School - Walter Benjamin Pt. 1
Walter Benjamin’s early work explores how modern technology has profoundly altered the way people experience art, identity, and reality. Beginning with his essay The Task of the Translator, Benjamin argues that translation is not merely about making a text accessible, but about preserving the deeper, almost spiritual essence of the original—a task bound up with the nature of art itself. He emphasizes that true art exists independently of its audience and retains a unique “aura” rooted in time, place, and presence. But this aura is threatened by technologies like photography, which make images infinitely reproducible while stripping them of their uniqueness. Benjamin traces this loss through the shift from painting to photography and ultimately to mass media, where everything—including people—can be commodified and endlessly copied. The result, he warns, is a cultural moment where individuality and aesthetic depth are flattened, and old methods of critique no longer suffice. His work sets the stage for a new way of understanding how technological reproduction reshapes not just art, but human perception and selfhood.
Further Reading:
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (1936)
Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art by Andrew E. Benjamin (2005)
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media by Walter Benjamin (2008)
See the full transcript here.
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