The Technology Of Redemption

In his works, such as Works of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and unfinished Arcade Project, Walter Benjamin had actually developed a cultural criticism on the phenomenon of mass culture. Owing to his unique "Criticism of Redemption", Benjamin considered that the development of new technology has the potential of redemption, and will promote the formation of the revolutionary mass culture, which differed from theories of contemporary scholars, especially the scholars of the first generation from Frankfurt school who were bound up closely with him, although they shared the same historical situation and similar theoretical background.Benjamin’s such understanding was influenced by Karl Marx. Marx had demonstrated the revolutionary potential of technology in two ways. On the one hand, the development of technology improves people’s "general intelligence", thereby it will form the basis of the self-conscious proletarian movement. On the other hand, directly caused by the technical exploitation of organic labor, the alienation will eventually trigger the revolutionary events. Just along the two ways, debates around the technology’s potential of redemption soon broke out inside and outside the Marxism, in face of the irreversible progress of technology. Opponents insisted that, for the first point, instrumental rationality has dominated human, and because of the domination, the development of technology will distort the development of human. For the second, opponents maintained that, as a kind of ideology or making peace with capitalist ideology, the technology’s ability of making illusion and bewitching the public is sufficient to cover up the alienation caused by technical development.Benjamin was well concerned of these dangerous. However, in his view, there was no essential distinction between the experience transformed by technology and the natural experience. He believed that, as an element of human’s essence, the development of technology can promote the liberation of human. It also has a revolutionary potential that can break down the aura of the spectacle. Benjamin probed into a new relationship between technology and art, and pointed out that if the technological capacity to produce is mediated by the utopian capacity to dream, there will be a true mass culture that can manage the relationship between technology and art, and technical revolutionary potential can also be redeemed.