Benjamin saw distracted mass reception as politically radicalizing

Evidence

The significance of the resulting changes in the mode of reception was for Benjamin political. The decline of the aura means that art is no longer ‘based on ritual’ but ‘begins to be based on another practice - politics’. ‘Reception in a state of distraction’ allows the audience to adopt a more detached and critical attitude: ‘The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.’ This new mode of reception, Benjamin believed, would lead the mass consumers of mechanically reproduced art to adopt a critical stance not merely towards what they saw but towards the capitalist society that produced it. Adorno argued that this belief involved a naive technological determinism, detaching the new physical means of mass reproduction from the bourgeois social relations of their use. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 120

Categorization

• XREF: The Benjamin-Adorno dispute on technology vs. social relations is a recurring tension the reader’s Marxist anti-postmodernist argument needs. — connects to: Benjamin broke with mentors over their war enthusiasm because politicization threatened pure intellect. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 341; Benjamin argued a work’s reception need not end with its petit-bourgeois audience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 904