Marcuse & Benjamin: Technology, Domination, and Cultural Transformation

For this session, we’ll be reading Herbert Marcuse’s “The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society” and Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Both texts interrogate the role of technology in shaping social life and cultural meaning.

In The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society, Marcuse argues that technological rationality is not neutral but carries with it a political dimension. Technology organizes social relations, labor, and perception in ways that stabilize existing systems of domination. At the same time, technology harbors emancipatory potential—it could be directed toward liberation rather than control, if freed from capitalist imperatives. Marcuse thus situates technology within the broader project of critical theory: exposing its dual role as both instrument of domination and possible medium of social transformation.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin examines how new technologies of reproduction, like photography and film, alter art’s function. Reproduction strips art of its “aura,” detaching it from ritual and tradition, and thereby democratizes access. Yet this same process enables new forms of political control, particularly in mass culture. For Benjamin, reproducibility is ambivalent: it opens radical possibilities for collective perception but also leaves culture vulnerable to manipulation.

Together, these texts probe how technology reshapes not only social institutions but also cultural consciousness. Marcuse emphasizes technology’s embeddedness in structures of domination and its latent emancipatory potential, while Benjamin focuses on the political ambivalence of aesthetic experience under conditions of reproduction.

The texts can be found here and here