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Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age

by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, Editors
Stanford University Press, Stanford CA USA, 2003
368 pp. Trade: $60.00, Paper, $25.95
ISBN: 080474435i, ISBN 0-8047-4436-x.

Reviewed by Mike Mosher

Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, translated from the German as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, has gradually grown in status to a crucial and canonical work, from which so much can be and has been derived or extrapolated. Editors Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan select and define its major themes, a process that, in itself, provides a useful key to Benjamin's essay. They then organize contemporary essays around these themes that at least touch upon them. Themes identified from "The Work" include Aura, History, Replication, Representation, Technology, Authenticity, Critical Discourse, Absence, Fetish, and Ritual.

It is interesting to read contemporary German and European scholarship on Benjamin. Some essays build upon Hegelian-Marxist or Heidegger’s philosophical tropes. Several authors wonder whether the loss of artworks' unique "aura" is furthered by digital media, or if their aura is amplified and distributed. Jurgen Link examines aura in Steven Spielberg's Hollywood films, while Peter Gilgen appreciates Benjamin's realization that film can provide an epiphanic "dialectical moment" connecting the viewer with history that never was . . . and perhaps should have been.

In literature, Lindsay Waters finds echoes of Mary Shelley and a foretaste of Julio Cortazar in Benjamin's assertion that "the cameraman and machine are now one," while the spirit of Benjamin's cafe conversations enlivens a fragment of Robert P. Harrison's fiction. Richard Schiff links Benjamin's interest in Marcel Proust’s memories of moments to photography and digital media. Walter Moser carries insights from "The Work" to a contemporary viewing of Weimar-era collagist John Heartfied. Beatriz Sarlo applies Benjamin’s theses to both jazz and the TV channel-changer zapping one image for another, while the historic essay inspires Maria Rosa Menocal’s examination of rock n' roll both recorded and in concert.

The contentiousness of several of this collection’s essays comes through in the title of Antoine Hennion and Bruno Latour's contribution, "How to Make Mistakes on So Many Things at Once—and Become Famous For It." Joshua Feinstein laments the failure of cyberspace to deliver Benjamin's materialist vision of a harmony of consciousness and technology in "If Only It Were Real." In a harmony of form and content, the book is graced with an evanescent cover design by Rob Ehle that is reminiscent of his 1990s podium at Xerox PARC, the research center where much of the technology that helps define our digital age was first developed and demonstrated.

In the book's Preface, editors Gumbrecht and Marrinan find Benjamin erroneous and out-of-date post-1989, with the "failure of his historical prognostication" and sloppy communist conviction that progressive forces shall evermore politicize aesthetics. This reviewer remains unconvinced by their argument. When one considers recent creative phenomena like community murals, 'zines, "billboard corrections," or Thurston Moore's anti-Iraq war MP3 website www.protest-records.com, one is heartened to think that there are more rebel media than ever in public hands. Benjamin would be proud.

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Updated 1st April 2004


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