INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES SPRING 2016
before , and more of them , in turn , can become engaged as writers ( I will explain later how this claim is important for Anderson ). 96 In the absence of ( religious ) aura , these new mass-produced mediums would serve a ( secular ) political purpose : they would foster a Communist collective subjectivity . Benjamin concedes that an alternative course is presented by Fascism , 97 which seeks to ‘ organise the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate ’. Fascism does this by allowing the masses ‘ expression ’ rather than their ‘ right ’ through the aestheticisation of politics ( as opposed to the politicisation of art ); for Benjamin , the artistic glorification of war and militar y technology is an important example . 98
What does Anderson take from these ideas ? For Benjamin , the development of ‘ print is merely a special , though particularly important , case ’ of mechanical reproduction , but one which is not as significant as film , 99 Anderson , though , wants to refocus the attention on print . This is because while Benjamin seems to view meaningful levels of mechanical reproduction as coinciding with the emergence of industrial capitalism , Anderson ’ s holds that mechanical reproduction was significant much earlier . 100 Anderson states that ‘ at least 20,000,000 books had already been printed by 1500 ’ and so the age of mechanical reproduction had begun by that time . 101 Essentially , Anderson takes the general trends that Benjamin attributes to industrial capitalism ’ s effect on art , and applies it to the impact of print -capitalism on an earlier cultural world of holy languages and imagined religious communities .
Anderson agrees that mechanical reproduction undermines the aura of cultural objects and therefore has potential political impact ( through changed consciousness / subjectivity ). However , given his own starting points , he finds that it is not the specific political impact that Benjamin had predicted . 102 Rather than serving communism by being a type of the self-destructive tendency of capitalism that Marx had pointed to , the loss of ‘ aura ’ of religious world-views caused by print-capitalism made a national consciousness possible . Anderson explains ( Marx and ) Benjamin ’ s miscalculation thus : ‘ whatever superhuman feats capitalism was
96
Benjamin , Illuminations ., 234 . More clearly in Reflections , trans . Edmund Jephcott ( New York : Schocken Books , 2007 )., 225 .
97
Lunn ( and others ) have noted that while Benjamin is optimistic in this essay , he was deeply pessimistic elsewhere about the same set of circumstances . His concerns about Fascism are perhaps a hint of this pessimism . Eugene Lunn , Marxism and Modernism ( University of California Press , 1982 )., 255 .
98
Benjamin , Illuminations ., 243 .
99
Ibid ., 220 . But see Reflections ., 225 .
100
Critics of Benjamin pointed out that mechanical reproduction had been around much longer than industrial capitalism . Anderson is therefore justified in shifting the focus from linking impacts of industrialism on culture and politics to the impact of a pre-industrial / non-industrial capitalism on culture . It is likely , given his brother ’ s involvement in Verso / New Left Review , that Benedict Anderson is aware of such criticisms . See Theodor ; Benjamin Adorno , Walter ; Bloch , Ernst ; Brecht , Bertolt ; Lukacs , Georg , Aesthetics and Politics ( Verso , 2007 )., 108 n5 . See also Marc Redfield , " Imagi-Nation : The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning ," Diacritics 29 , no . 4 ( 1999 )., 64 n11 .
101
Anderson , Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism ., 37 .
102
In fairness to Benjamin , his references to Fascism suggest he was not blindly optimistic or set in his predictions .
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