Abstract
Since Walter Benjamin wrote the famous essay2 whose title is echoed here, the art of mechanical reproduction has been transformed by the advent of electronics. The age of electronic reproduction raises questions yet more profound than those addressed in Benjamin’s prescient piece.
For a long while I treated my pen as my sword; now I realise how helpless we are…. Culture saves nothing and nobody, nor does it justify. But it is a product of man: he projects himself through it and recognises himself in it; the critical mirror alone shows him his image.1
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Notes
Jean-Paul Sartre, Words, translated by Irene Clephane (London: Penguin, 1964).
Available in Paul Valéry, Collected Works, Vol. 13, Aesthetics, trans. by Ralph Mannheim Bollingen Foundation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964).
Hilary Putnam, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’, in Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Paul Valéry, Collected Works, Vol. 6, M. Teste, trans by Jackson Mathews Bollingen Foundation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 72.
Charles Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
Discussed in David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses: A Realistic Theory of Perception (Baton Rouge and London: Lousiana State University Press, 1986). The idea of unmediated presence has been the target of much muddled criticism by Derrida et ah, as I discussed in Not Saussure (London: Macmillan, 1988). The post-Saussureans would welcome for this reason the future unanchored consciousness because it would seem to correspond to their claim that there is no first-order reality, only signs and signs of signs, no unmediated existence, only mediations, no presence, only absences.
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© 1999 Raymond Tallis
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Tallis, R. (1999). The Work of Art in an Age of Electronic Reproduction. In: Theorrhoea and After. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27100-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27100-9_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-27102-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27100-9
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