Benjamin, the Image and the End of History

Transcription

1 Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Benjamin, the Image and the End of History Chiel van den Akker To cite this article: Chiel van den Akker (2016) Benjamin, the Image and the End of History, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 3:1, 43-54, DOI: / To link to this article: The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 18 Jul Submit your article to this journal Article views: 601 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

2 Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2016 VOL. 3, NO. 1, BENJAMIN, THE IMAGE AND THE END OF HISTORY Chiel van den Akker Department of Art and Culture, History and Antiquities, VU University Amsterdam OPEN ACCESS ABSTRACT In his famous 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin tells us that in his time art became valued for its exhibition value instead of what he refers to as its secularised ritual or cult value. This essay makes this bold claim plausible by arguing that it means that a historicising gaze no longer has a function in the reception of art. Although this argument is supported by Benjamin s use of the concepts of authenticity and aura, it is somehow missed by Benjamin s many readers. His essay, as it turns out, presents an end of history thesis, which foreshadows the condition of the image in contemporary media. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 July 2015 Accepted 6 April 2016 KEYWORDS Walter Benjamin; historicising gaze; authenticity; aura; end of history In place of aura, there is buzz. David Joselit, After Art In his lectures on aesthetics in the late 1810s and 1820s Hegel stated that art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Fine art in his time was no longer destined to satisfy the spiritual needs of man. We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them, says Hegel. Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art. Art is first acknowledged as such in the moment of reflection, a reflection that from the end of the eighteenth century onwards is inherent in all encounters with art. This is equally true of the contemplative spectator as it is of the artist, for the artist too, Hegel tells us, cannot escape the world of reflection and its relation in which he lives. 2 In a footnote in his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin quotes favourably this passage from Hegel s lectures, after stating that there are two polar planes on which works of art are received and valued: one centres on the cult value of the work, the other on its exhibition value. 3 In his footnote he adds: The transition from the first kind of artistic reception to the second characterizes the history of artistic reception in general. 4 This transition was taking place in his time: for the first time in world history, he writes, technologies of reproduction emancipate the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. 5 Art became valued for its exhibition value. As a CONTACT Chiel van den Akker c.m.vanden.akker@vu.nl 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License ( which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

3 44 C. van den Akker consequence the unique, authentic work of art was no longer the criterion for its production. The new technologies of reproduction that Benjamin refers to are photography and film, which exemplify art s new function. 6 The transition from cult value to exhibition value is a change in how art is experienced and perceived. This transition can be characterised in terms of a declining historicising gaze. This is how I will read Benjamin s essay. The reading is supported by Benjamin s use of the concepts of authenticity and aura with which he explains the transition. It is also supported by recent essays of Diarmiud Costello and Miriam Bratu Hansen who argue that the concept of aura is a historical category something which art has or acquires only at a particular historical moment. 7 There is a difference of course, between having and acquiring something. In this context, Costello criticises Douglas Crimp, who also believed that aura was a historical category, 8 for not pursuing his argument to its conclusion. Rather than being a property of art in a particular historical period, Costello argues, aura belongs to the structure of perception, a particular way of perceiving the world at a particular moment in time. 9 This is also what Hanson argues: 10 but there is more to it. The concept of history permeates Benjamin s essay on the work of art. One obvious reason is that the transition from cult value to exhibition value is a historical phenomenon. However, Benjamin does not show much interest in history as an account of the past as it has been ; he is more interested in how art s past cult value is present in the work we look at attentively. 11 Another reason why the concept of history permeates Benjamin s essay is that authenticity too is a historical category. Finally, and most importantly, his essay presents an end of history thesis, which foreshadows the condition of the image in contemporary media. This explains why his essay is as relevant as ever. 2. Probably the best known and much quoted passage of Benjamin s essay is this: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space [das Hier und Jetzt], its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence [einmaligen Dasein] of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. 12 This passage allows me to make two remarks that show that history is central to Benjamin s essay. The distinction between unique works of art and their reproductions concerns their unique existence in time and place rather than their particularity there being only one such thing. This might seem odd, for obviously reproductions exist in time and space too. However, there is an important distinction that supports Benjamin s claim. A reproduction is an instance of a work. As such, it has no substantive duration, no singular existence (einmaliges Dasein) in the here and now (das Hier und Jetzt): this instance of the work here after all is interchangeable with that instance there. The reproduction of the Testa d angelo of Verrocchio in my study for example is not the work itself. As an instance of the work it is interchangeable with other identical prints, whereas the particular reproduction I have in my possession for many years, it is not. Since the reproduction is not the work itself, the work s history cannot be based on this particular reproduction, for that history depends on the unique work of which it is a reproduction. The reproduction I have in my possession, as

4 Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 45 reproduction, has a history of its own where and when it was bought for what reason, the rooms it hung in, what it reminds me of, the damages it suffered, and so on. Now we also understand the footnote accompanying the passage just quoted. It says that the history of an artwork also encompasses the copies of it, if there are any. In contrast to unique works of art, reproductions, as instances of the work, do not determine their own history: their history is determined by the original artwork of which they are a reproduction. If we cannot make a material or visual distinction between an artwork and its reproduction at some moment in time, there is, apparently, still a difference to be made, for as Benjamin emphasises: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence. What this means becomes clear in a remark of Nelson Goodman as he discusses fakes and forgeries, which intend to be perfect reproductions. Goodman states: A forgery of a work of art is an object falsely purporting to have the history of production requisite for the (or an) original of the work If at a given time I cannot see the difference between an original and its forgery, there is still a difference to be made, for the fact that one is an original and the other is not is sufficient to establish that in the future I might come to learn and see the difference, and that difference is not limited to perceptual differences alone. 14 Arthur Danto too emphasised that the difference between a forgery and an original need not only be a perceptual difference, and he criticises Goodman for suggesting that all aesthetic differences are perceptual differences. This criticism is unjustified. Danto arrives at the same conclusion as Goodman as he states: Its being a forgery, one would think, has something to do with its history, with the way in which it arrived in the world. 15 The point is that terms such as uniqueness, originality, forgery and fake in the context of artistic reception depend on the work s singular existence in time. Benjamin uses the notions of authenticity and aura to elaborate on the distinction between works of art and their reproductions. These notions too only apply to works that have a singular existence in time which is recognised as such by the viewer of the work. 3. The notion of authenticity enables us to distinguish unique works of art from their reproductions. Benjamin reserves this notion for unique works only: the whole sphere of authenticity [Echtheit] is outside technical and, of course, not only technical reproducibility. 16 Authenticity, in other words, is not reproducible. The footnote accompanying Benjamin s claim again has something of importance to teach the reader. In it he observes that a medieval picture of the Madonna at the time of its inception was not authentic. Authenticity, apparently, is something which an object only acquires in retrospect. This is in agreement with the claim that only unique works of art, as opposed to their reproductions as instances of the work, have a singular existence in time, for only what exists in time and thus has a duration may acquire authenticity as time goes by. A fake or forgery, we might say, falsely purports to have acquired this authenticity. Here the artwork s authenticity is identified with its history, and that is also what Benjamin does. He states: The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration [materiellen Dauer] to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony [geschichtlichen Zeugenschaft] rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to

5 46 C. van den Akker matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. 17 The work of art has to become authentic, for only at some moment in its lifetime, after collecting a certain amount of history during its existence, does the assertion that the work is authentic make sense. If this is so, then the object s authenticity is identical to its historicity, for the historicity of a thing is the present awareness of its existence in time, stretching backwards into the past and possibly forwards into the (unknown) future. Starting with this awareness, we may infer from the object, its craftsmanship, means of symbolisation, intended meaning, changes of ownership, scars and other marks of time, its past existence, and try to understand its historical significance by retrospectively relating it to other objects and events. 18 This way the object s career would come into view and this career is what its testimony (geschichtlichen Zeugenschaft) is all about. Not only the living are characterised by having a past and a present, as Benjamin s contemporary and fellow philosopher John Dewey observes: art has too, inasmuch as we are able to perceive its history at a particular moment in time. 19 Not only does the object s authenticity depend on its past existence, so does its authority, as Benjamin emphasises, and when the object s substantive duration ceases to matter, it loses its authority because of that. Authenticity thus is not some inherent property of a work that we detect or construct. 20 Rather, it results from a retrospective understanding of the work s existence in time its inception, appreciation, the possible damages it suffered, its testimony and so on. This identification of authenticity and historicity is hardly surprising if we realise that both concepts originate in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German Romanticism, the cradle of modern historical consciousness, with which Benjamin was well acquainted, given his study of the movement early in his career in his doctoral dissertation. 21 In this context the footnote I referred to at the beginning of this section is of interest for another reason. In it Benjamin not only uses authenticity in the systematic sense in which I discussed it; he also uses authenticity in a historical sense when he writes that the painting of the Madonna became authentic most strikingly so during the last century. Here authenticity is a historical category because it is an attributed property of art at a specific period in time. Works of art not only acquire authenticity as time goes by, it is a feature of art that the nineteenth century brought to light. Apparently, Hegel was right. In the period we associate with modern historical consciousness the historicist nineteenth century art had become a thing of the past: no matter how we see [...] Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help; we bow the knee no longer. 22 Only unique works of art acquire authenticity, and especially so in the nineteenth century, when art, in the words of Hegel, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past Benjamin introduces his much celebrated notion of aura in the context of discussing authenticity. He identifies the aura of a work of art with its uniqueness 24 and asserts: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art, for the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. 25 It is not until here that Benjamin anticipates the main theme of his essay to identify the differences that the new technologies of mechanical reproduction began to make at the dawn of the twentieth century. First Benjamin claims that:

6 Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 47 the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. 26 Few would dispute that historically art has its basis in cult and ritual, first magical, then religious. The discussion above warrants the interpretation that this basis is remote in the nineteenth century, in the Hegelian sense that by then art had become a thing of the past. I take it that the most profane forms of the cult of beauty refer to museums, galleries and salons, where works of art are reflected upon rather than being bowed to : or, as Benjamin has it in his 1939 essay on Baudelaire: In the beautiful the ritual value of art appears. 27 After having claimed that the ritualistic basis of works of art was still recognisable as secularised ritual in his day, Benjamin formulates what I take to be the central thesis of his work of art essay: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice politics. 28 The change from the work of art reproduced to the work of art made for reproducibility is the change which Benjamin s essay is all about. In the case of, for example, prints and photographic reproductions ( works of art reproduced ) there is a difference between the unique work of art and its mechanical reproduction, whereas in case of photography, film, and graphic design as works of art themselves ( art made for reproducibility ) there is not. 29 In the context of art made for reproducibility, it no longer makes sense to distinguish between originals and their reproduction, the work s substantive duration ceases to matter and authenticity is no longer a criterion for artistic production. When this happens the aura of the work withers and art s parasitical dependence on ritual comes to an end to be based on politics. Photography and film exemplify this new function of art. Benjamin s central and bold claim is that the advent of the new technologies of reproduction reverses the total function of art. Decisive is that these new technologies increase the possibility of art to be shown exponentially. This quantitative shift turned into a transformative shift of the nature of works of art, according to Benjamin: the secularised ritualistic or cult value of the work of art is replaced by its exhibition value. 30 It would be a misunderstanding to relate this exhibition value to the appreciation of art in museums and galleries, for the new technologies of reproduction do not depend on such profane places of the cult of beauty as albums, cinemas and today the Internet demonstrate. Paradoxically, art having an exhibition value is no longer art that is associated with and dependent on exhibitions in museums and galleries. Art designed for reproducibility is typically art made for and seen by the masses art that satisfies their desire to bring things closer. 31 With the album, the magazine, radio, and more recently, television and the Internet, this desire is increasingly satisfied. The masses react differently to art, as Benjamin observes: they react in a reactionary fashion to a painting by Pablo Picasso while reacting progressively to a Charlie Chaplin film. 32 Contemplation is exchanged for reception, concentration for distraction (Zerstreuung), and the artwork absorbing its viewer is exchanged for the viewer absorbing the artwork. 33 This change in reaction is integral to the transition of artistic reception from the work s remote cult value

7 48 C. van den Akker to its exhibition value and the decline of the work s aura that accompanies this transition. In this context, Benjamin writes in his essay on Baudelaire that perceptibility, as the poet Novalis said, is a kind of attentiveness, adding that the perceptibility that Novalis had in mind is none other than that of the aura. 34 This transition in artistic perception is further described in terms of the practice on which art is based and in terms of a loss of aura and authenticity. 35 It is the loss of aura and authenticity that I am particularly interested in here. Art s remote dependence on cult and ritual explains why works have aura. Therefore art s liberation from its dependence on ritual and cult is further explained by the loss of its aura. 5. With the advent of the new technologies of reproduction the work of art loses its basis in tradition and ritual. That is why according to Benjamin the aura withers in the age of mechanical reproduction. The analogy with natural aura which he defines as the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be 36 supports this, as we will see. In the accompanying footnote Benjamin adds that his definition of aura is nothing but the formulation of the cult value of works of art and the way this cult value is perceived. 37 Perhaps Benjamin added this remark to underline the specific meaning of aura he had in mind in his work of art essay and his claim that the aura declines as a result of photography and film. Benjamin first introduced the concept of aura in the context of his discussion of early photographic techniques that caused a halo or aura on photographs (curiously, the effect was simulated in the 1880s). 38 This sense of aura Benjamin finds scarcely interesting. There is another, interesting sense in which photographs can be auratic, which can be found in his Little History of Photography and later essays. There is more continuity and consistency in Benjamin s thoughts on aura than some authors would have us believe. What we need to understand first is that the aura of a work is the appearance of its cult value. This interpretation of the concept of aura is directly related to the function of artworks and its transformation from the late nineteenth century onwards. As with authenticity, there is a systematic and a historical sense of the term. Only unique artworks existing in time have an aura, and only in retrospect. Aura, like authenticity, belongs to our understanding of the artwork rather than to the artwork itself. It is not an inherent property of it, but something which comes to the fore in the encounter with the artwork, as all commentators on Benjamin s essay emphasise. Costello for example, writes: Aura is best understood as a predicate pertaining to the subject rather than the object of perception; it describes how that subject is capable of encountering its objects. 39 Douglas Davis contends that the aura does not reside in the thing itself, but in the originality of the moment of seeing, hearing or reading. 40 This is at best only half the truth, for the originality of the moment requires a work of art that exists in the here and now. Moreover, only a unique work of art has an aura as the result of pondering its singular existence (einmaliges Dasein) in time. Furthermore, the aura only comes into being as a result of an attentive perceptibility, a historicising gaze, rather than in the moment of seeing, hearing, or reading. Hansen, in her insightful and extensive discussion of the concept of aura, also emphasises that aura comes into being in the encounter with the artwork. She puts it thus: The aura is a medium that envelops and physically connects and blurs the boundaries between subject and objects, suggesting a sensory, embodied mode of perception. One need only cursorily recall the biblical and mystical connotations of breath and breathing to

8 Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 49 understand that this mode of perception involves surrender to the object as other. The auratic quality that manifests itself in the object the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be cannot be produced at will; it appears to the subject, not for it. 41 The aura of an object, in other words, is something that needs to be brought to consciousness. Unique artworks have an aura only as the result of pondering their unique existence in time, and only, I insist, insofar as they are reminiscent of their former use value in tradition and ritual. The secularised cult of beauty that Benjamin refers to, embodied by the nineteenth century museum and gallery, provides this reminder. Put differently, artworks have an aura only inasmuch as they can and are viewed with a historicising gaze. The sensory mode of perception that Hansen identifies with the concept of aura, which she, rightly I think, associates with Romanticism and the sublime, is in agreement with this. 42 Hansen however, does not elaborate on this association. Historians studying German Romanticism and the modern historical consciousness to which it gave birth define the historical sublime as the shock and awe that is felt the moment it is realised that the world to which the artwork or other artefact belonged is gone. Such realisation brings about a revelation of a distant past in which the work originated and from which one feels separated. 43 In case of works of art, one might say this revelation concerns its cult value, which provides the work with its aura. It is how the work appears as a result of a historicising gaze, as the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be. Here the unapproachable past and distant cult value is present ( near ) in the work. This understanding of aura relates to a second definition of aura, to which both Costello and Hansen draw our attention - the aura as the invested ability of the artwork to look back at us. This definition of aura, which is only implicit in Benjamin s work of art essay and can be found in his later essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, underlines once more that the aura is not some inherent property of some work but an ingredient of how the object is perceived. Benjamin writes: To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. 44 The person gazing at the auratic object not merely sees the object, but endows the object with the ability to look back. That is why the aura is a medium that envelops and physically connects according to Hansen. 45 Costello elaborates on this second definition of aura differently. He reminds us of the fact that works of art not only represent things in the world, but also present to us a particular attitude towards the things they represent. That is why, according to Costello, it makes sense to state that works of art, like persons, look back at us. 46 These two complementary elaborations underline that the aura of a work results from a particular way of perceiving the work, a kind of attentiveness, as Benjamin has it, with reference to the early Romantic poet Novalis. I think there is more to it. A more complete elaboration might be thus: investing the artwork with the ability to look back at us is setting forth a former self we have lost before ourselves. The aura as the cult value of the work, distant though apparent in the work because of a historicising gaze, gives us a sense of what has been and is no longer, and by extension, a sense of what we have been and are no longer, that is, a sense of a former self looking back at us. Here the encounter with a work of art is an encounter with an earlier life, with La Vie antérieure, as the title of a sonnet of Baudelaire has it and is discussed by Benjamin in the context of auratic experiences. 47 Incidentally, this explains why photographs, which otherwise exemplify the decline of the aura, can be auratic, return our gaze, and have a cult value. In his work of art essay, and this is in agreement with his earlier photography essay and his later Baudelaire essay,

9 50 C. van den Akker Benjamin locates the last cult value and aura of images in early photographic portraits, where the person photographed reminds its owner of a lost or distant loved one. 48 Here the photograph functions in a cult of remembrance, and what one sees is not only the lost loved one, but also a former self who one is no longer. In these auratic photographs, the earlier life returns the gaze. Aura, in short, is the presence of the past one has lost. This elaboration of the aura as the invested ability of the artwork to look back at us is consistent with the definition of aura as the unique appearance of a distant, however far it may be. It also makes clear how and in what sense aura is the result of a historicising gaze. A historicising gaze makes the work s cult value appear in the work. This sense of aura makes of it a historical category, for only after art had become a thing of the past its cult value in ritual appears as remote in the nineteenth s century cult of beauty. 6. If the new technologies of mechanical reproduction liberate the artwork from its remote dependence on tradition and ritual as Benjamin claims, and this remote dependence comes into view because of a historicising gaze which makes us aware of the work s authenticity and invests it with its aura, then the work of art designed for reproducibility makes this historicising gaze superfluous. Therefore it is this historicising gaze that withers in the age of mechanical reproduction. This withering involves an ensemble of perceptual shifts. I fully agree with Hansen when she contends: by insisting on both the aura s internally retrospective structure and irreversible historicity, he [Benjamin] can deploy the concept to catalyze the ensemble of perceptual shifts that define the present such as the ascendance of multiplicity and repeatability over singularity, nearness over farness, and a haptic engagement with things and space over a contemplative relation to images and time and posit this ensemble as the signature of technological and social modernity. 49 I started this article with Hegel s claim that art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. This claim was still true early in the twentieth century. The work of art was valued for its remote dependence on ritual in the cult of beauty. Thought and reflection still spread their wings above fine art. The new technologies of reproduction would end this nineteenth century world of contemplation. The function of art was transformed and art became valued for its exhibition value. The artwork lost its aura the moment it was no longer reminiscent of its highest vocation. The transition from art s remote dependence on ritual in the nineteenth s century cult of beauty to art s exhibition value in the twentieth century is a change in how art is experienced and perceived. This change I characterised in terms of a declining historicising gaze. Clearly, it does not imply that the history of photography, film or art in general could no longer be written. It means that this historicising gaze no longer had a function in artistic reception. Art, in other words, no longer was a thing of the past. With the advent of the new technologies of reproduction, the truth of Hegel s thesis would come to an end, for it would no longer apply to the then present. 50 In this specific sense, Benjamin s work of art essay formulates an end of history thesis. The general transition in artistic reception that Benjamin made us aware of agrees well with our current media culture that fully exploits art s exhibition value. The new technologies of reproduction of our day are the new media. This explains the renewed interest in Benjamin s work of art essay by new media scholars and its continuing relevance. In our

10 Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 51 information society, where the image is everywhere at once, reproductions and art designed for reproducibility circulate. In place of aura, there is buzz. 51 Notes 1. Joselit, After Art, Hegel, Aesthetics, Benjamin, The work of Art, 218. I will refer to this translation, which is a translation of the third, 1939 version of the essay. For crucial phrases I make use of the German version of the essay. 4. Benjamin, The work of Art, 238, n. 8. Benjamin was no admirer of Hegel s work. In the reception history of his work there are frequent quotes from Benjamin s 1918 letter to his friend Gerhard Scholem in which he writes that what he read from Hegel thus far repelled him. Benjamin, Briefe I, 171. Of the few references to Hegel in his Briefe, one is about Hegel s lectures in aesthetics on which Benjamin writes in 1925, also in a letter to Scholem, that he as yet has not been able to consult it in full. See Briefe I, 373. In his work Benjamin refers only sporadically to ideas of Hegel. 5. Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin, The work of Art, Costello, Aura, Face, Photography, 167; Hansen, Benjamin s Aura, Crimp, The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, Costello, Aura, Face, Photography, Hansen, Benjamin s Aura, In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, , a central idea of Benjamin is that history should be concerned with the presence of the past rather than with the past as it was. His Theses deals with a wholly different set of issues than the ones I raise in this article. The second central claim of Benjamin s theses is that the living have a weak messianic power to readdress past injustices, and only historical materialists are aware of that. Benjamin, Theses, Benjamin, The work of Art, Goodman, Languages of Art, 122. My emphasis. 14. Goodman, Languages of Art, Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin, The work of Art, The retrospective nature of history is argued for by Danto in his Narration and Knowledge. 19. Dewey, Art as Experience, This is also what Siân Jones concludes after discussing several conceptions of authenticity in her Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves, On this and Benjamin s intellectual development, see the indispensable introduction by Steiner, Walter Benjamin. See also Hanssen and Benjamin eds., Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. 22. Hegel, Aesthetics, It makes sense to consider a second meaning of authenticity which is sometimes used in the sphere of reproductions, for example when someone speaks of an authentic play or motion picture. The distinction between these two senses can be theorised as a distinction between material authenticity and conceptual authenticity. (This structures the collection of essays edited by Aldrich and Hackforth-Jones, Art and Authenticity). A play is called authentic when the actors wear clothing that accurately represents or documents the clothing worn in the historical period in which the play is situated. Authenticity in this sense means something like being a testimony to an object s unique existence in time. A reproduction is a document in itself, a testimony of the original of which it is a reproduction. We thus may retain the concept of authenticity in the domain of reproductions if we so desire, albeit in its sense of

11 52 C. van den Akker documenting what the past was like. As said, history as an account of the past as it has been is not something in which Benjamin shows much interest. 24. Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin, The work of Art, Cf. Groys, Art Power, 84 86, who mistakenly believes that it makes sense to speak of a distinction between originals and reproductions or copies in case of digital images. This is due to the fact that he omits to distinguish between reproductions of artworks and artworks that are made to be reproducible. He writes such things as (p. 85): The digital image is a copy but the event of its visualization is an original event, because the digital copy is a copy that has no visible original. This means that A digital image, to be seen, should not be merely exhibited but staged, performed. Groys makes too much of it. Think of photography, here too the analogue original is absent (invisible) when looking at one of its prints. Furthermore, the event that Groys talks about, seems to be nothing more than the processing of the file which is a reproduction process that is logically similar to printing. 30. Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin s claim may be generalised. Such things as labour, transportation and communication also underwent a quantitative shift turning into a transformative shift in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Like artworks made for reproducibility, they are the product of industrial capitalism with its focus on repetition, utility, standardisation, uniformity, commoditisation and profit. 31. Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin, The work of Art, Benjamin, The work of Art, On distraction, see the interesting article by Eiland, Reception in Distraction Benjamin, Baudelaire, Benjamin ends his work of art essay with the claim that fascism aims to organise the new proletarian mass without changing the ownership of the means of production. Fascism s aesthetics of politics aims at war, for only war is able to give the mass a goal if the alternative of changing the ownership of the means of production is not carried out. Stating that art is based on the practice of politics today cannot mean what it did for Benjamin in the 1930s, even although the aesthetics of violence, war and its supposed heroism, is very much a commonplace of today s visual culture. 36. Benjamin, The work of Art, 216. The German [die] einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne is more adequately translated as the singular appearance of a distance He also used this definition in his 1931 essay Little History of Photography, Benjamin, Little History of Photography, Costello, Aura, Face, Photography, 167. For similar formulations, see for example Duttlinger, Imaginary Encounters, 86 and Davies, The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Hansen, Benjamin s Aura, Breath and breathing is the original Greek and Latin meaning of aura Hansen, Benjamin s Aura, On the relation between the historical sublime, modern historical consciousness and Romanticism, see Ankersmit, The Sublime Dissociation of the Past. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness; Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. The relation between what historians refer to as the historical sublime and the sublime in German Idealism is insufficiently studied. 44. Benjamin, Baudelaire, Hansen, Benjamin s Aura, 339 and Costello, Aura, Face, Photography, Benjamin, Baudelaire, 178.

12 Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology Benjamin, The work of Art, 219. Benjamin anticipates this theme in his photography essay in his discussion of portrait photography and its social function. Cf. Duttlinger, Imaginary Encounters, 95 96, who argues that Benjamin s writing on photography develops an alternative concept of aura. 49. Hansen, Benjamin s Aura, I therefore disagree with Pippin s central claim in his After the Beautiful, 38 and 64, that Hegel is the theorist of modernism in the visual arts. 51. Joselit, After Art, 16. Curiously, Joselit believes that his claim that today s images are everywhere at once and have value because of that is a claim contra Benjamin. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Chiel van den Akker received his PhD in philosophy from the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands) in He has published on narrative understanding, Arthur Danto s aesthetics and historical representation. Currently he is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of History at the VU University Amsterdam at the department of Art and Culture, History and Antiquities. References Aldrich, M., and Hackforth-Jones, J. (eds.) Art and Authenticity. Farnham: Ashgate. Ankersmit, F The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer, History and Theory, 40 (3): Benjamin, W Briefe I, Herausgegeben und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Gershorn Scholem - und Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Benjamin, W Little History of Photography. In W. Benjamin (ed) R. Livingstone (trans) M. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith (eds.) Selected Writings Volume , pp Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H Arendt (ed) Illuminations, pp London: Random House. Benjamin, W On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. In H. Arendt (ed) Illuminations, pp London: Random House. Benjamin, W Theses on the Philosophy of History. In H Arendt (ed) Illuminations, pp London: Random House. Costello, D Aura, Face, Photography: Re-reading Benjamin Today. In A. Benjamin (ed) Walter Benjamin and Art, pp London and New York: Continuum. Crane, S Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Crimp, D The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, October 15, Danto, A The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Danto, A Narration and Knowledge. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Davis, D The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Leonardo 28(5): Dewey, J [1934]. Art as Experience. New York, NY: Perigee. Duttlinger, C Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography, Poetics Today, 29(1) : Eiland, H Reception in Distraction. In A Benjamin (ed) Walter Benjamin and Art, London and New York: Continuum.

13 54 C. van den Akker Fritzsche, P Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. Goodman, N Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Groys, B Art Power. Cambridge Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press. Hansen, M Benjamin s Aura, Critical Inquiry 34(2): Hanssen, B. and Benjamin, A. (eds.) Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. New York and London: Continuum. Hegel, G Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. T.M. Knox (trans), Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jones, Siân Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity, Journal of Material Culture 15(2): Joselit, D After Art. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Pippin, R After the Beautiful. Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Steiner, U Walter Benjamin. An Introduction to his Work and Thought. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.