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Issue 8. Mélanges/Miscellaneous

Mapping or Zapping Benjamin?
on: Gumbrecht and Marrinan, Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age.

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: May 2004

Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age

edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan

Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003

Walter Benjamin's 1936 "Artwork" essay is probably the most commented upon and (over)analyzed piece of critical writing of the XXth century. Therefore, the least one can say is that the need of a new collection of essays exclusively devoted to this famous article is not imperative: nobody is waiting for another bunch of speculations on the "loss of aura" or on matters of "technical reproduction", and nobody has the illusion anymore of being able to unravel the ultimate meaning of Benjamin's nostalgic prophecies.Nobody is eager to absorb more than 300 new large pages on the subject.

The editors of this collection, therefore, bet on the originality of their concept for reading Benjamin, which implies a double mapping.

The first one concerns the attempt to give a kind of snapshot of what scholars today think of Benjamin's text:

The distance and contrast between our situation and that of Walter Benjamin are what the title of our book tries to capture: a mapping that measures the distance and locates the coordinates of Benjamin's essay so as to clarify the contrast that accounts for the essay's strength and intellectual appeal. Precisely because Benjamin's critical concepts and his analytic yield were so historically specific (...) they have obliged later generations of readers to ask: what, precisely, have been the intervening changes in the relationship between the arts (in the largest sense of the word) and their technological environments? There can be no single answer to such a question, nor even an emerging point of convergence. (...) the essays we received have convinced u s that the mapping of Benjamin's concepts is dynamic, never completely closed, uneven in its zones of intellectual intensity, and constantly offering and asking for revisionist moves. (Editors' Preface, xv)

The second one concerns the attempt, made by the editors themselves, to give a sort of non-linear organization of the whole book, with a minimal interfering of editorial authoritarian comment:

Based upon our own reading of the Artwork essay, we isolated sixteen critical terms that seemed germane to Benjamin's analysis. We decided to proceed, in a strictly formal operation, by "tagging" each of the thirty readings with the three most apparent conceptual links to Benjamin's text, selected from our pool of sixteen. (...). The Table of Contents is no less than the schematic diagram of this mapping operation. (...) In a second -equally arbitrary- formal decision, we grouped our sixteen key terms into eight pairs of juxtapositions, corresponding broadly to their use and function within Benjamin's argument (...). We then wrote, independent of one another, commentaries on "one side" of each pairing, trying in each case to refer centrally to the "other side" of the pair. In other words, we wrote eight "dialogues" to open or chart the intellectual terrain for the eight large sections of the book. (id., xv-xvi)

The result of this challenging project, however, is frankly disappointing (and often a little dull). The decision to invite thirty contributors was clearly unwise. How could the editors hope to avoid massive overlap and chaotic repetitions between the essays? How could they reasonably think that it would be possible to stop, within the frame of very short articles (the average length must be some 9 pages), endless and pointless reflections on couples such as "history/politics" or "presence/absence"? The problem becomes even more serious when the reader confronts the essays with the eight dialogues on the sixteen Benjamin keywords written by the editors themselves. The value of these small chapters is highly ambivalent: although these texts give a good survey of the conceptual skeleton of Benjamin's text from a contemporary point of view, they are an indirect but often cruel denunciation of what is lacking in most of the other articles' superficial embroidering on Benjamin's themes. (A symptomatic example of much of this babble is the article by Siegfried J. Schmidt).

In short, the editorial framework of this collection provides a useful shortcut to Benjamin's essay, but when it comes to put some meat on the bones, half of the contributors tragically fail and the overall impression the reader is left with is that of cacophony and indifference.

Things get even worse when one tries to get some grip on the editorial rationale of the whole book. Nowhere does one find a single mention of the time and place in which the book has been composed. One can only deduce from some indirect evidence (for instance the fact that the final bibliography contains no items after1995, or the fact that of one the articles has been coauthored by Bill Readings, who died in 1994, or the fact that several contributors refer to the 1936 essay as a text published six decades ago) that this book was originally planned to appear in 1996. The reasons for the unusual publication delay are not explained, nor is any effort made to find a compensation [in what sense?] for it. Yet during the years 1996-2003, the Benjamin boom has attained even higher peaks than in the early 90s. (It may suffice to mention, for example, the influential special issue of Critical Inquiry on Benjamin's media theory).Even stranger is the way the contributors have been selected. Some essays have clearly not been written for the collection, but translated or adapted for the good cause's sake. Yet in some cases the "unoriginality" of these texts is indicated (as for instance in the case of R.P. Harrison's text), whereas in other cases a complete mystery surrounds their origins (Antoine Hennion and Bruno Latour's article, by far the most important of the whole book, had appeared first in a French version, in the very first issue of the Cahiers de médiologie). Corollarily, the non-German readers of this book may ask why so many German authors have contributed to the volume, and why the editors did not make any attempt to give only a minimal presentation of the work of these scholars.Isn't important, in a book of Benjamin, to know "from which viewpoint" somebody is speaking? I think there is no serious excuse here for the lack of any authors' biography and bibliography). One finally also wonders why the non-German reader finds in the bibliography only the references of the German translation of authors such as Virilio or Ginzburg. From a collection published by Stanford UP, one has the right to expect a more careful and stronger editorial hand.

Do all these critiques mean that Mapping Benjamin is a book with more flaws than virtues?? Such a judgment would be excessive. Besides the useful "keyword" essays by Gumbrecht and Marrinan, one discovers here some superb essays, most of them perversely grouped at the end of the book, as if the editors had tried to save the collection with an explosion of fireworks at the finale: the text by Maria Rosa Menocal on the aesthetics of "coverability" in jazz and rock, that by Beatriz Sarlo on malls and post-cinema, and the final attack by Stephen Bann on the authoritarian doxification of Benjamin by John Berger, are all examples of imaginative and thought-provoking writing on the problematic relationship of art and mass culture. (In order to be honest, I should add that several other texts, for instance that by Jan and Aleida Assmann and that by Pericles Lewis, are also highly stimulating). The most important contribution, however, is that by Hennion and Latour, a careful debunking of the categorial mistakes in Benjamin's essay (the confusion between ritual cult and religion, the conception of technique as reproduction, the picturing of the masses as a crowd), which explain simultaneously the essay's seductions for all types of readers. I can only urge the reader of Mapping Benjamin to study all those essays and to forget as soon as possible the book that threatens to bury them in a not very Benjaminian logorrhea.

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