introductory essay
presented at the launch of this website, 26 October 1996, Camerawork Gallery, London.
Aptly enough, it is the very reproducibility of Benjamin's theses on
reproduction that has made them so enticing. The essay's compression, just
a few easily photocopyable pages, its saleability or availability in sundry
readers or compendia, the limpidity of its argument a narrative of
transpositions that tolerates cursory, boiled down retransmissions all
these factors have reinforced the omnipresence and unforgoability of the
Artwork essay. It is as if the essay about reproduction were designed for
reproduction.
And reproduced it has been in various versions and languages; each
prolonging and proliferating the essay's afterlives. Another type of
transmission can now be acknowledged: a digital translation of the essay
into and out of code. The newest forms of reproduction the CD ROM and the
Internet invent new ways of actualizing Paul Valéry's prediction,
ventriloquized in the Artwork essay. Valéry compares the provision
in the home of water, gas, and electricity, via an almost imperceptible
movement of the hand, with the domestic supply of visual or auditory
images, barely more than signs, which likewise appear and disappear at a
simple movement of the hand. (I) A technologically
prompted process of breaching distance, of bringing art and data and
materials within the ambit of people, to be used, to be manipulated by
masses, is, of course, the paramount promise, outlined in the Artwork
essay. It is the commitment to translation. Translation means to convey a
thing from one place to another, and such a definition smacks on the core
of the Artwork essay itself. The essay concerns the translation of art; the
move of art from one time to another, from one space to another, from one
condition to another that is, from uniqueness to reproducibility. Modern
art is truly the advance guard; it "meets the viewer halfway" it
comes out of darkened niches, out of the gallery, out of fixed time space
coordinates. In the age of technical reproducibility, art is, at least
potentially, removed figuratively and literally from its traditional
spaces; indeed art disintegrates and multiplies all at once. Making
propaganda for the physical displacement of dematerialized culture
clusters, Benjamin plots a new spaciality and temporality for modernity,
and notes that:
"the technique of reproduction [...] loosens the reproduced object
from the domain of tradition. In multiplying the reproduction, a unique
occurrence is substituted for one that is of a mass nature. And in
permitting the reproduction to meet the receiver in his own particular
situation, it actualizes the object reproduce."
(Walter Benjamin:
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in
Illuminations, Fontana, London 1992, p215. [translation
modified]
Re-situating the artwork, insists Benjamin, generates new contexts and
discloses an optical unconscious; new things come into view, for the first
time, and new connections are made. Each new transmission of the artwork
makes the artwork actual again, significant, in the present for each new
user. Likewise each new transmission of the Artwork essay reactivates, or
reactualizes, its theses.
Broadcasting data through time and space was long a concern of Benjamin's.
In his youth flushed essay "The Task of the Translator" he speaks
of the afterlife of a text, once translated from one language to another,
from one epoch to another. Afterlife is an image he declares well chosen
for it indicates the transformation and renewal of something living.
"The Task of the Translator" and the Artwork essay both make a
case for calling into question the authority of the original and the
translations of Benjamin's work across languages surely rattle the
authority of his original piece what ever we understand that original to be
as the translations take up new existences in exile. There are questions to
be asked of the relationship between the Artwork essay in German, as
written by Benjamin, the English translation by Harry Zohn from 1968, the
French translation by Pierre Klossowski, put out in the 1930s. These
questions indicate something of the political nature of translation, and
the political moment of translation. But translation is not simply a
question of transmission from one language to another. Translation also
relates to Benjamin's own processes of translation of the Artwork essay
into differing versions; three versions in fact, written over a period of
five years, under varying conditions with different historical and
political questions pressing upon his consciousness. But to mention this
brings us to the question of the contemporary relevance of the Artwork
essay.
Why retransmit the essay? Is it still valid? Has history proved wrong or
corroborated Benjamin's diagnosis of aesthetic, social and political
shifts? The question is misplaced. The essay was never valid
in that sense, because it was never essentially a description of
actuality. It was a description of tendencies in
actuality. Writing the essay was a political act of incision into actuality
an effort to rescue social theory and art criticism from fascists and
quietists.
In writing, Benjamin effects, in the words used to describe the activity of
the cameraman, a deep penetration into the web of the world, in order to
recoup myriad fragments which he then assembles according to a new law.
Using theory in this way does not aim to blankly mirror reality, but to
delineate the ways in which everything is cleft. Benjamin writes doubly:
observing a schism between the actual fate of art and the potential
directions for art in the twentieth century. The eventual outcome of the
two fold reading of actual and potential developments in art is contingent
on the abolition or continuation of capitalist relations of production.
As Benjamin's tale of the fate of art goes, by 1900, or thereabouts, art
has to chance to break away from, or to be broken from, magic, ritual and
religion. By 1900 photomechanical reproduction is perfected, swallowing up
the images of all previous art and generating its own inimitableforms. By
1900 too, Atget has formulated a desolate subject for photography, breaking
with the sentimentalism of portraiture to document spaces of the objective
world. Technological artforms surface because they are demanded by the
matrixed masses who inhabit a technologized world. What have we had then,
100 years on, 100 years of what did art fulfil the pledge uttered by
Benjamin? What was the pledge? at its most modest, emancipation from art as
known by our 19th century cousins, at its most ambitious, total social
emancipation, an unleashing first whispered, first instituted by art? No
guarantee came with the essay.
The epilogue of Benjamin's essay surprises by reversing the current; all
the potential credited to art in the age of technology evaporates before
the techno mysticism and class violence of the Nazis. In the essay's coda
Benjamin determines that fascists mirror mass society in representations
without substance; and so they too participate in technological modernity.
But, he is sure, as he states in the opening thesis, that fascists and
reactionaries cannot participate in his discussion of
technological modernity. They cannot benefit from his dialogue with art,
technology and technique, his persuasive attempts to bolster an art sucked
of myth and aura. And they can win no advantage off his conceptual
dissection of technology and technique that analyses for the benefit of
practitioners who desire to produce an art that operates in a "truly
revolutionary way", an art, that is, that translates the relations of
aesthetic production.
Importantly though, the articulated structure of the essay reiterates at
each turn: there is no aesthetic revolution without social revolution;
social change, economic change, aesthetic change, all move together, or
slip out of kilter, to disastrous effect. Were he present today he might
have noted that in the sparkly cyber world that discharges his essay into
digitalized ambience, still extant relations of production known as
copyright, ownership, authorship irritate like ever recurring symptoms of a
social disease.
What has happened in the translation of the Artwork essay
into digitality. Has a modern "optical unconscious" some sort of
"digital unconscious" emerged, that was previously imperceptible,
arguably not there before? If a digital unconscious has evolved then it
might indicate the fractured, dispersed perspective of hypertext wherein
the essay has collapsed into the critiques and commentaries that surround
it. The original may have sunk into a padding of interpretation, now
inseparable from it; but separating us from it, as it brings it closer.
Benjamin was intrigued by the Romantic notion of Critique as the
continuation of the artwork. Here the critique encoded into our versions of
the essay may be the continuation of the Artwork essay. Perhaps translation
into the digital disperses further the compact authority of the Artwork
essay; as commentaries, annotations, linkages, and keywords turn the
audience into recompositers, and authors into producers.
[Esther Leslie]