(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA
113
In his essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”
(“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”
1935; third version, 1936–39) 1 Benjamin argues that the media
of technological reproduction, such as photography and film, destroy the
“aura,” that is, the traditional artwork’s quasi-sacred halo of originality
and uniqueness. In so doing, Benjamin argues, film instigates a new,
emancipatory way of seeing, which helps viewers to recognize the spectacular
self-representations of Fascism, defined by Benjamin as a new and
false aestheticization of politics in mass rallies, the cult of the Führer, and
other such “auratic” effects of mass manipulation. As if bringing into play
Benjamin’s own valorization of mechanical reproduction over the auratic
nature of the original work of art, the curators here, alluding to Benjamin’s
essay, seemed to empower the visiting masses “des Gegenstands aus
nächster Nähe im Bild, vielmehr im Abbild, in der Reproduktion, habhaft
zu werden” (GS I.2:479; “to get hold of an object at close range in
an image, or, better, in a facsimile, a reproduction,” SW 4:255), at the
expense of being captured by the spell of originality and uniqueness. In
presenting the visitor with an exhibition copy, the curators sought to pry
Klee’s painting out of its auratic shell and destroy what — in Benjamin’s
view — would cause the viewer to submit thoughtlessly to its authority
and vanish into the painting’s commanding here and now. Instead of
catering to a museological culture of staged authenticity, the makers of
the Documenta thus seemed to emphasize the transitoriness and instability,
the democratic appeal and anti-hierarchical language of contemporary
artistic production and exhibition. In doing so, however, they of course
unsettled the very rationale that informed the prominent placement of
Klee’s painting in the entrance’s area in the first place. While Klee’s angel
instantly invoked Benjamin’s intellectual aura and interpretative authority,
the label spoke out against desires for the auratic and authoritative. While
the image served as a locus of pre-stabilized meanings directly referring
us to Benjamin, the label referred to Benjamin’s thoughts on mechanical
reproducibility, which bring into question the power of any single image
to produce certain effects or references.
A curatorial oversight? A performative self-contradiction? An insider
joke? This is not the place to speculate further about the intentions of
Roger Buergel, the artistic director of Documenta XII, in positioning
Benjamin’s Klee painting as a motto at the beginning of his show. What
needs to be pointed out is simply the extent to which Buergel’s curatorial
intervention is symptomatic of the fact that Benjamin’s famous dialectic
of traditional art and mechanical reproduction today no longer seems to
form some kind of historical dialectic; that in our era of ubiquitous digital
screens, interfaces, and technological mediations we instead have come to see
the auratic and the post-auratic in an open relationship of supplementariness
and coexistence, a non-climactic give-and-take structured by a logic of