Reality in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Part of the kurios&käuflich journey is to think about reality, and how we construct it from the signs and rituals we collectively create, consume, and engage in.
It is no exaggeration to say shit got seriously real in the past weeks - even for us in our comfy chairs looking at glowing screens most of the days.
I fully acknowledge my privilege to write this lines in existential safety, only virtually harmed by what I have the freedom to pay attention to.
It’s tempting to write no one of us in Western Europe could have anticipated Putin’s hot war against Ukraine, the resulting refugee tragedy, or the exposure of our (esp Germany’s and Austria’s) dependence on Russian fossiles.
But this, of course, is self-deception. Putin’s aggressive invasion doesn’t even qualify for a slow-burning grey rhino event, given Crimea’s occupation since 2014.
And yes, it is cognitively very dissonant to realise how emotional involvement with a conflict negatively correlates with euclidian distance to respective conflict (compare Hamburg - Kyiv, Aleppo, Kabul, Sanaa, respectively).
It has become fashionable in the past 3 years or so to make witty comparisons between the original and the ‘new 20s’, often sprinkled with a ‘history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme’ sentiment.
In my opinion most of those comparisons are flat takes (the study of which is in itself is a major destination of the kurios&käuflich journey.)
But there certainly is value in revisiting the seminal texts of the epochs we are trying compare ourselves with. One of this texts is Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in different languages and versions between 1935 and 1939.
On the first pages, Benjamin cites Paul Valéry, who writes in his 1934 ‘Pièces sur l’art’
Much like water, gas, and electricity come to serve us in our appartments, from a far remote place, by barely noticeable movements of our hands, we will be provided with images and sequences of sound, which casually appear and disappear on the requests of our gestures.
A major theme in Benjamin’s Work of Art essay is the notion of authenticity, which in his view inherently fails reproduction: “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be located.”
However, mass audiences happily trade the authentic spatio-temporal uniqueness of events or objects for their actual accessibility. In Benjamin’s view, this trade-off deteriorates what he calls the art’s aura, its aesthetic authority.
Looking at even those short excerpts, it’s easy to see the continued critical authority of the Work of Art for the 2020s. We could easily replace film and photography in the original text with YouTube and Instagram and it makes perfect sense, or in Benjamin’s words: “the reproduction actualises the reproduced content by approaching the recipient in their own respective situation”.
Unfortunately, this actualisation also holds for another major theme in Benjamin’s text, which is the attention-economical relation between media, mass market attention, and war:
Mass reproducibility favours the reproducibility of the masses. In the big parades, the sports events, and in war, all of which are being supplied to the apparatus of reproduction, the masses face themselves [...] This means that all mass movements, including war, are the kind of human behaviour which particularly fits the apparatus.
With the algorithmic apparatus, we still have the privilege of being able what reality we choose to paying attention to.
Acknowledging this privilege is the bare minimum we can and need to do right now.
Take care,
Daniel