ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin has occupied an ambivalent place in cultural studies since the, early 1970s when his two seminal essays written in the 1930s, ‘The artist as producer’ (Benjamin, 1970a) and ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (Benjamin, 1970b), were first published in English. They were rightly hailed as key contributions to the development of Marxist theories of art, as well as to what has since become known as cultural politics. The influence of Brecht is particularly noticeable in ‘The artist as producer’; and in cultural studies generally, as well as in journals like the New Left Review, the names of Brecht and Benjamin were frequently mentioned together. Both writers were looked to for their committed but unaligned Marxism which was far removed from that of the official Marxism of the communist parties of the 1930s and later of the Stalinist era. Both Benjamin and Brecht recognized, with some urgency, the need to extend the role of the intellectual in order to engage with the people and to do this through transforming the existing mass media while simultaneously making use of their technological advances. While this might seem commonplace now in the 1990s, the simple insistence by Benjamin (who was writing against the backdrop of Nazism with all that entailed politically and culturally) that ‘The rigid, isolated object (of art)… is of no use whatsoever. It must be inserted into the context of living social relations’ (Benjamin, 1970a: 52) was a remarkably radical statement even in the early 1970s when in the British university system there were almost no interdisciplinary studies in the humanities, where politics was still something which rarely if ever entered the seminar room or lecture theatre, where the social sciences were narrowly positivistic and empirical, and where theory was equated with the history of ideas.
