Walter Benjamin

As early as 1935, Walter Benjamin intuited much of the issues we are dealing with in today’s digital landscape. Just as the printing press allowed the unlimited reproduction of the written word, contemporary technology has provided for the endless recreation of all media forms.

The endless reproduction of print is similar to today’s digital landscape, but unlike the situation in the 1450s when someone needed the money to buy their own printing press and set their own type face/font and bind and distribute their product… today, anyone with literally the cheapest computer or at least access to a computer can reproduce virtually any visual representation, be it print, photo, sound, film, or computer animation.

The ease with which any digital artifact can be re-appropriated is obvious when you look at the re-release of Toy Story. What was originally a very popular film, has, with a minimal of effort, been remade as a digital 3D version. Doubtless, whatever aura Walter Benjamin was writing about is obscured by this recreation of a classic Pixar film. For example, which version is to be regarded as the original? Surely someone will argue that the digital 3D version best captures the film’s spirit. And, since both were rendered on computers and designed by a team rather than any one individual, any coherent concept becomes the purview of a committee rather than the vision of an artist. Surely even the original Toy Story would be something of a curiosity to Walter Benjamin initially because we as an audience are asked to take that film and reinterpret it with the addition of new 3D technology. Is one version more authentic than the other? Does someone have to see both the original and the 3D version to completely digest the Toy Story experience?

For all of his insight, Benjamin does not offer anything in the way of a solution to artistic production in modern-day society. It is one thing to recognize a system of control, in this case, the bourgeois appropriation of modes of production. But it is quite another to offer an alternative means of production. For example, it seems self-destructive to encourage the downloading of television shows, music, film, and all other digital media, outside of any model of compensation for the artist or production company. Whether or not someone steals or buys media from the internet; the question goes unanswered, where does the artwork’s aura lie?

It is interesting to consider how the proliferation of the Christian Bible would have been altered it any individual had been able to recreate, modify, and reproduce biblical text on their own printing press. Because that is precisely the situation we face today. Walter Benjamin conceived of a world where business interests appropriated artistic texts for their own ends. In evolving beyond that, what has occurred is a system of almost self-destructive egalitarianism. Today, there is no incentive for preserving the aura of an artwork and there no incentive for protecting the vision of an artist. Rather, everyone is encouraged to make new any digital artifact that they access.

The critical thinker of today needs to consider both the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction – the artwork that Benjamin was specifically concerned with—and contrast it with the free-for-all that has resulted from the proliferation of digital media. While Benjamin’s work is quite apt, it highlights how dramatically technology has altered our lives. The principles that Benjamin outlines are quite sound, but the specific seem outdated to the point of irrelevance.

What is certain, the hackneyed discussion of the Mona Lisa’s representation on t-shirts and coffee mugs, grossly oversimplifies Benjamin’s thesis. Benjamin did not simply state that an artwork loses its aura through mechanical reproduction, his interests lay in the much more complicated question of what elicits human emotion and what constitutes art when the world is more eager to replicate itself endlessly than it is to preserve any semblance of uniqueness.