The Eye of the Expert: Walter Benjamin and the avant garde

In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ of 1935/36, Walter Benjamin considers the effects of new conditions of production and commerce on the response to visual stimuli and on the structure of works of art, contrasting reception characterized by ‘aura’ with that characterized by ‘distraction’, the gaze of the (bourgeois) art lover with that of the working ‘expert’. This essay represents Benjamin’s theory of a new and positive form of mass spectatorship; in it he seeks to rise to the challenge of conservative critiques of culture, finding revolutionary potential and cognitive value in seemingly debased modes of apperception. By focusing on the notion of the ‘expert’, this article seeks to plot new coordinates by which to map the complex conceptual work involved in Benjamin’s influential theses. The ‘expert’ was a key figure in the radical retheorization of cultural values in Weimar Germany, one implicated in the crisis of the traditional intelligentsia as well as in the processes of professionalization that affected fields from the arts to the sciences. Benjamin and those close to him in the Constructivist avant garde felt the pressures of new conditions of intellectual work, and traces of this can be found in the essay. There is also evidence of another process affecting the nature of thought in modernity: as objects of knowledge came to be approached within the parameters of narrowly defined professional concerns, both the origins and uses of the knowledge produced inevitably tended to fall into the blind spots of professional vision. By studying his contact with and borrowings from bodies of professional expertise, this article will question the extent of Benjamin’s awareness of changing conditions of knowledge in the twentieth century.