Politics in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility: Thinking with Walter Benjamin

This paper revisits Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, focusing on his exploration of how new systems of work, machines, and techniques fundamentally reshape everyday sensory experiences such as sight and hearing. Benjamin examines these transformations through the interplay between art and politics, grounding his analysis in the concept of ‘representation’ and its implications for perception, art, and political systems. The introduction of new technologies – such as the printing press in the fifteenth century and the invention of cinema, radio, and photography in the twentieth century – provoked instability in the relationship between democracy and authority. These shifts unfolded in the tension inherent in new technologies: their potential for liberation versus their use as tools for social control and propaganda. Rethinking Benjamin’s insights today illuminates the instabilities and opportunities produced by contemporary technologies, which grant unprecedented access to information production and dissemination while reshaping our representations of reality and politics. This paper analyzes these dynamics with sustained attention to the present, offering a critical perspective on the political and cultural possibilities emerging from current transformations in the concept of representation.