A Study On Benjamin's Mass Culture Ideas

Walter Benjamin is a famous western thinker, he makes great contribution to such aspects as philosophy, history, language, literature and art. After his death, his works have been cleared up and published by Adorno. The field of world culture study plays a high emphasis on his ideas about culture industry and mass culture. In recent years, Chinese scholars also began to pay attention to his dissertation of mass culture.This paper tries to start with Benjamin's ideas of mass culture and analyzes production, consumption, aesthetic characteristics and political function of mass culture so that we can absorb the soul of Benjamin's mass culture ideas and get some enlightenment from it.This thesis includes five parts.First, birth of culture industry leads to form the substantial and technological basis of mass culture, at the mean time it changes the means of culture production.Second, the means of culture production changes and it demands that the consumers(audiences) should adopt the suitable consumption means, so the audiences' positivity and activity will intensify.Third, with the development of mass culture, the aura of culture products by hand disappears gradually and the products of modern culture industry create new aura ceaselessly. Such is the aesthetic characteristic of culture industry products.Fourth, development of culture industry and popularization of mass culture make the political function of mass culture exert fully, guarantee the democracy and human rights, improve the knowledge and moral standards of audiences. But at the same time we should prevent the negative effects of culture industry and mass culture.Fifth, we discuss the impacts of Benjamin's mass culture ideas on culture study.