(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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LUTZ KOEPNICK
disruptive and quasi-traumatic qualities of the cut, film had the inherent
task of positioning the viewer as one continually prevented from empathetic
identification and auratic absorption — creating a highly attentive
but also profoundly distracted viewer eager to insert the filmic product
into the structures of everyday life, to connect to other audience members,
and thus to engage in the construction of new types of communities
outside the theater. Films, on the other hand, that sought to mask the
disruptive and displacing language of the cut — whether they aimed at
artificially recreating aura by using film stars’ images or relied on classical
principles of smooth, invisible continuity editing — not only immobilized
what Benjamin considered the emancipatory structures of filmic viewership,
but, in a strict sense, violated the very ontology of the medium and
thereby disqualified themselves from being counted as representatives of
the medium in the first place. New media, for Benjamin, were new, not
only because they — even when incorporating the old — broke with the
representational structure of existing media, but because in so doing they
also initiated the possibility of completely new cultural practices and forms
of social appropriation.
While today’s critical conversations about new media can certainly
learn a lesson or two from Benjamin’s dual emphasis on the logics of cultural
technology and the social practice surrounding them, Benjamin’s
rather emphatic and eminently modernist notion of medium specificity
renders universal applications and recyclings of his thought today problematic.
Whereas Benjamin’s aim was to identify a coherent, systematic,
and self-contained logic of the new medium of film, such writing
as Manovich’s on (digital) new media emphasizes the essentially hybrid,
fluid, and pluralistic character of their language. Whereas Benjamin
described desired social practices as an effect of the most undistorted
unfolding of a medium’s inherent language, the stress on new media’s
hybridity in contemporary writing cautions us against any normative
claims about their contents, aesthetic successes, and political missions.
Even the most cutting-edge merging of time-based arts and computing
power today does not allow us to make an automatic judgment about a
certain work’s aesthetic success or potential social usage. And even the
most technophile rhetoric of innovation and progress today cannot conceal
the complex logic by which various new media today borrow from
and enrich the language of other (older) media — and thus ultimately
efface the very assumption of categorical newness that drove Benjamin’s
own thought on mechanical reproduction.
III
Though Manovich’s work plays an essential role in thinking through the
constitutive elements of new media today and how they may differ from