(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

114
LUTZ KOEPNICK
addition rather than one of mutual exclusion or contestation, by a conjunctive
“and” rather than a combative “either/or.” Though Benjamin,
in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”
had left little doubt about the fact that all art in principle is and has always
been a potential object of reproduction, his decisive move was to conceptualize
the media arts of photography and film as radically breaking with
the representational and perceptual registers of preindustrial society and
thus redefining the very nature of art and the aesthetic in modernity. The
historical breakthrough of technical arts that no longer produced originals,
for Benjamin did not simply change the role of certain forms of art
and aesthetic experience in society but revolutionized the entire concept
of art. For Benjamin, the logic of media innovation and technological
change was irresistible and irreversible: the advent of newer media such
as film and photography radically recalibrated the location of art and
aesthetic experience in society; it completely reconfigured the structural
relationships between spectator and work as much as between audience
members themselves; and last but not least, it transformed the concepts
and categories according to which past and present generations had
evaluated the quality of art, discussed its meanings, assessed its political
and social investments, and conceptualized art’s effects on the beholder’s
body and senses. At its best, to invoke the auratic under the aegis
of post-auratic culture could not but lead to a violation of the formal
inventory of technological art; at its worst, it resulted in what Benjamin
famously called the aestheticization of politics, that is, Fascism, understood
as an attempt to satisfy the masses with symbolic spectacles of
collectivity that obscure the factual fragmentation and stratification of
society. The technological base of new media such as film and photography,
in Benjamin’s eyes, therefore, did not simply make previous artistic
forms and practices look really old but instead produced conditions
radically delegitimizing any attempt to bring old and new into some
kind of productive conversation. Any form of art that in the age of its
mechanical reproducibility aspired to the auratic was not real art at all.
It instead became ideology, a mechanism masking the order of the day, a
diversion from how media arts promoted distraction — a mode of viewing
that does not absorb the viewer — as an antidote to the authoritarian
effect of the auratic in art.
More than seventy years after its initial publication, Benjamin’s essay
on mechanical reproducibility has remained a key text in many debates
about the role of art and the aesthetic in a society defined by advanced
media. Though the technologies of artistic production and reproduction
have undergone tremendous changes since the 1930s, Benjamin’s conceptual
matrix — the juxtaposition of the auratic and the post-auratic, of
aesthetic originality and infinite reproduction, of contemplative surrender
and distracted appropriation — continues to inform contemporary