Oppression Of Culture And Power Within Walter Benjamin

Intersecting layers of culture and power have the potential to be transformative, however both have been normalized in a way that grants certain privileges while creating and reinforcing structural inequalities for everyone outside the dominant narrative. This is powerful to note because it highlights the internalized consent of authority which forces conformity, otherwise people are criminalized when they challenge systems of power. Therefore, standard modes of functioning within society are a combination of how power is validated, as well as how culture is a driving force to validate that power by not questioning the authority of what people have known and survived off of. This trickles down into the subconsciousness of people’s minds, in

The concept of aura is mentioned by Benjamin, which highlights how ideas and emotions are exclusive in order to restrict a critical consciousness that goes beyond the normal social binaries. It normalizes the structures of power in order to justify the complacency of social norms because of the impact of media representation that is exclusive and dominant by power structures. This relates to Benjamin's exemplification of replicating power through narrowing representation. Benjamin states, “The concept of the aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects can be usually illustrated with reference to an aura of natural objects” (Benjamin 53-255). This allows people to become infused with the media that is reproduced because it justifies the reality they are surrounded by, which relates to how power and the media culture are intertwined in order to perpetuate colonial legacies. For instance, the normalization of law and power is a prime example of how hegemony has constructed not only the reality we live in, but the conscious and subconscious decisions we make are responses to the environments we have adjusted to. Similarly, prisons and modes of punishment have become normal forces of constructing and regulating societies, in which the

Gramsci and Benjamin emphasize the potential of transforming power dynamics through deconstructing mainstream culture, as well as normalizing a revolutionary culture within mainstream society in order to shake the consciousness of the public. Benjamin mentions how art, culture and perception is constantly changing according to our environments. He writes, “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception” (Benjamin 53-255). This is related to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, in which power and consent are intertwined because of the mainstream culture that gets passed down by dismissing and erasing alternate forms of formating society. For instance, within Gramsci’s work The Prison Notebooks, he emphasizes the power of cultural hegemony, which has been an issue to formulating a revolution within oppressive societies because of the power and violence that is used in order to sustain hegemonic forces, whereas repressive action and stigmatization are enforced if hegemony is broken. Gramsci notes, “The most typical of these categories of intellectuals is that of the ecclesiastics, who for a long time held a monopoly of a number of services: religious ideology, that is the philosophy