Prior to the tutorial I found Benjamin’s reading completely tedious to read through due to its massive number of subject-specific terms and what I found to be incoherent and unfocused writing. I found that while reading through there would be certain individual paragraphs that raised interesting points the overall length and writing of the text felt redundant and failed to make or establish any significant points that stuck with me.
After my first read I found his point about the increasingly two way feedback of author and audiences (due to press and internet) as well as the comparison between a camera operator and painter to be noteworthy points, but they were largely drowned out by the rest of the incomprehensible text. I raised my discontent with the text during the tutorial with Putri which allowed me to understand that Benjamin was largely trying to portray the significance of technology (hence his title) as well as his thoughts on authenticity, meaning and the necessity of captions for artworks.
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It also took me a couple of times of reading to grasp Benjamin’s idea in this piece, mainly because of his back-and-forth/dialectical writing style. Benjamin divided the text into 19 sections, starting from “simple” artwork and built it up to the more complex ones (films, architecture); using each section to elaborate his main inquiry: the tension between the artist-artwork-audience relationship and its relation to the labour (or, in his word: proletarianization). Benjamin’s motivation is actually visible in the first part of his article, though: “What could be expected, … was not only an increasing harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of conditions which would make it possible for capitalism to abolish itself” (p.19).
Although he also believes that any work of art is reproducible, his suspicion lies on what might be triggered by such reproduction. He specifically pointed out “captions” when posing his argument about photography and how the exhibition value surpasses its cult value; when the work of art no longer speaks for itself, but require certain narratives to emit certain idea to the audience (see p.27). It correlates to his argument in section 18 (p.39): “Quantity has been transformed into quality: the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation” and how he later concludes the article.