Abstract
Since Benjamin’s essay on the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction” technical innovations have continued to transform not just the very notion of art, but the very notion of “reality”. The imagined boundary between the time and space of art and the time and space of “reality”—whether the “time and space of the work of art” could still be conceived as “autonomous”—was at issue for Benjamin as well as for Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse. Other theorists drawn on in the chapter include McLuhan, Virilio, Bauman and Rancière. The principal literary “works of art” referred to here are Beckett’s “Ping”, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and DeLillo’s White Noise. The final part examines the ongoing question of the place of art in a world where any “autonomous” space seems inconceivable. Rancière’s concept of “shared surfaces” perhaps provides a resolution of the debate on the “time and space” of the work of art.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity, 1991, p. 24.
- 2.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. by H. Zorn), London: Pimlico, 1999, p. 211.
- 3.
Wilde ’s character Vivian argues this in “The Decay of Lying”, in Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , London and Glasgow: Collins, 1966, p. 985.
- 4.
Nigel Thrift, “From born to made: technology, biology and space”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS30 (2006), pp. 463–476, p. 472. https://nigelthrift.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/tran_570.pdf (accessed 28.8.2018).
- 5.
David Pinder, “Dis-locative arts: mobile media and the politics of global positioning”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 27(4), 2013, pp. 523–541, p. 523. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.803303 (accessed 29.08.2018). One might say the “cartographers of the empire” referred to by Jean Baudrillard (after Borges) in that famous characterization of the postmodern “Age of Simulacra and Simulations” and its subjects now use GPS—all of the time. In Baudrillard’s allegory the “empire” merges with and becomes its own representation; life becomes art(ifice)/simulation; the line between the two is erased. Pinder in the line quoted above mentions the “digitalization of […] life” itself as well as of space; he also writes that it is necessary “to consider how new forms of location awareness or ‘awhereness’ are bound up with transformations of capitalism, and with geopolitical and military concerns” (526).
- 6.
Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See (trans. by Julie Rose), Oxford: Berg, 2007, p. 14.
- 7.
One might say that while the plot of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent centres around a botched terrorist attack on the Greenwich Observatory—a supposed attack on science itself—it was perhaps the scientists and the artists of the day who were the more effective bombers with greater long-term effects. The inventors of new media as well as new concepts and technologies and radical avant-garde artists impatient with bourgeois stuffiness and intent on bringing art into everyday life could be said to have been setting off bombs in the institutions of high culture and traditional authority.
- 8.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, 1997, p. 121.
- 9.
Émile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames translated as The Ladies’ Delight by E.A. Vizetelly (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1400561h.html), Chapter 1, paragraph beginning “Uncle Baudu was forgotten.”
- 10.
Adorno , “Commitment”, in Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht and Lukacs, Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 1980, p. 190.
- 11.
Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, S. Gontarski (ed.), New York: Grove Press, 1995, p. 193.
- 12.
Adorno , “Commitment”, p. 189.
- 13.
Adorno , “Trying to Understand Endgame”, in O’Connor (ed.), The Adorno Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p. 329.
- 14.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 66.
- 15.
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 68.
- 16.
Jameson writes of a return to figurative art, “but this time to a figurative art—so-called hyperrealism or photorealism—which turns out to be the representation, not of things themselves, but of the latter’s photographs: a representational art which is really ‘about’ art itself!” Jameson, “Conclusion” in Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch etc., Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 1980.
- 17.
Marcuse , One-Dimensional Man, p. 13.
- 18.
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, London: Sage Publications, 1998, p. 191.
- 19.
Marcuse , One-Dimensional Man, p. 11.
- 20.
Benjamin , “The Work of Art…”, p. 220, p. 224.
- 21.
Jameson , “Postmodernism…”, in Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, p. 74f.
- 22.
Mentioned by Jameson in his “Conclusion” to Aesthetics and Politics, p. 211.
- 23.
Don DeLillo, White Noise , London: Picador, 2011, p. 43.
- 24.
Virilio , Art As Far As the Eye Can See, p. 118.
- 25.
Virilio , The Information Bomb, p. 12.
- 26.
Virilio , The Original Accident, Cambridge: Polity, 2007, p. 25f.
- 27.
Virilio , Art…, p. 14.
- 28.
Virilio , The Information Bomb, p. 84f.
- 29.
Virilio , The Information Bomb, p. 29.
- 30.
Virilio , Art…, p. 118.
- 31.
Virilio , Art…, p. 125.
- 32.
Virilio , The Information Bomb, p. 38.
- 33.
Virilio , “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!”, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=72.
- 34.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London: Routledge Classics, 2001, p. 12.
- 35.
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, London: Penguin, 1967, p. 63.
- 36.
McLuhan , The Medium…, p. 45.
- 37.
McLuhan , Understanding Media, p. 13.
- 38.
McLuhan , The Medium…, p. 53.
- 39.
McLuhan , The Medium…, p. 120.
- 40.
McLuhan , Understanding Media, p. 35.
- 41.
Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (trans. by Gregory Elliott), London: Verso, 2007, p. 51.
- 42.
It might in passing be suggested that the avant-garde “practice of montage”, “blurring of boundaries” etc. may not always have been so much a way of counter-posing themselves to the “reign of commodities” so much as to the linear continuity of bourgeois tradition and order (which of course included the reign of commodities). One way or another—either through artistic subversion or through the progress of capitalism (or indeed as a result of the “electric age”)—the continuities of that old order have passed away. The reign of commodities and of capitalism clearly hasn’t.
- 43.
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity, 1997, p. 95.
- 44.
Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism”, in Lodge and Wood (eds.), Modern Criticism and Theory, Second Edition, Pearson Education, 2000, p. 362.
- 45.
Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 91.
- 46.
Quoted by Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso, 2011, p. 71.
- 47.
David Pinder, “Dis-locative arts: mobile media and the politics of global positioning”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 27(4), 2013, pp. 523–541, p. 524. One of the artists he mentions is Paula Levine who, in Shadows from another place, overlaid maps of San Francisco with maps of Baghdad after the aerial bombardment by US planes in 2003 and of the West Bank barrier built by Israel—to “translate and represent the impact of political or cultural traumas […] that take place in one location, upon another”, as she puts it on her website: http://paulalevine.net/portfolio_page/shadows_from_another_place/ (accessed 31.8.2018).
- 48.
Rancière , The Emancipated Spectator, p. 13. An example of this was to be experienced during the Tino Sehgal “Performance” at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2015: the spectators who entered the exhibition space literally became participants in the performance.
- 49.
McLuhan , The Medium…, p. 53.
- 50.
Joyce , Ulysses , p. 28.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kane, M. (2020). The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction. In: Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37448-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37449-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)