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How to make mistakes on so many things at once--and become famous for this
Antoine Hennion and Bruno Latour, CSI, Ecole des Mines, Paris. Once upon a time, when people believed in structures and power, we have been strongly influenced by Walter Benjamins famous article. The endeavor, in those remote times, was to escape the disregard for technical devices of the Marxist and critical traditions, in spite of their much vaunted materialism. Until then, these devices were only considered as pure neutral instruments that could become good or bad depending on the interests they served. Benjamin and other Frankfurters came and taught us otherwise. Technique makes power. Look at the arts, they say. A simple change in the means of reproduction has produced an astounding transformation in the content of the works themselves, and in their audience. Jesus made a mistake: the multiplication of breads has transsubtantiated the host as well. The message was strong, and, indeed, it did not escape notice. Today, when re-reading the paper, our spontaneous reaction is quite different. Once due hommage has been paid to the precursor, once acknowledged what the present critique of Benjamin owes to Benjamin himself, we are quite amazed by the number of mistakes which the paper cheerfully gathers, and by the deep misunderstandings of most phenomena, modern or past, which it reveals. In a somewhat provocative analysis, we suggest here that, far from being the weak counterpart of a strong text unable to prevent its many qualities to assure it of a deserved success, these mistakes are the main source of the fascination which it has exerted, and which, as it appears, it still exerts. In a collage which few authors have dared making with so much ingenuity, every aspect of the modern world is briefly portrayed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: art, culture, architecture, science, technique, religion, economics, politics, even war or psychoanalysis. And, each time, in our view, a category mistake makes Benjamin takes one for another.

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A repetitive dichotomy organizes the whole argument: singularity, contemplation, concentration--and the aura, on one side; masses, distraction, immersion--and loss of the aura, on the other side. But the status of this aura is most ambivalent. As it organizes not only Benjamins argument, but most of the actual discourses on modernity and the past, it deserves a more precise scrutiny. This appeal to the aura provides Benjamin with a very efficient way of being always right. When looking at modern times, the aura is seen as a kind of Lost Paradise, a negative foil in contrast with which Benjamin describes the new effects of the mechanical reproduction of works and the new seduction of the masses that have replaced the former beauty of art. But, when looking at the past, the nostalgia for the aura is itself seen, by Benjamin, as an illusion, as a relic, as the residue of a cult value. So the critic of modern art can itself be criticized as a reactionary looking for a lost bourgeois elitist conception of art. The modern standardized copies of art have lost the authenticity of the real presence--but the real presence was itself an old religious artefact.1 With the first collage between art and religion comes what we will bluntly call Benjamins first mistake: the ritual cult rendred to the hidden image of God, may be a good definition of idolatry, but surely not of religion. You cannot at once use religion to denounce modernity, and modernity to denounce religion. Either, as a good modern rationalist, you mistake the aura for the religion--but then you loose the benefit of denouncing the desacralization of art: you have already burried it with the modern tools of rationality, unable to see the difference between fetishism, which religion has always fought, and religion itself; and, reciprocally, the desacralization of art which modernism should provoke has no sacred meaning: as long as it just means the loss of its fetishist value, what it is supposed to have lost is something that had never been sacred--religion has always said, that God was not in the image, but further away. Or else, you put something real in the aura, denouncing the modern fetishism which replaces God by idols--but then, why do you have to speak of movies, new techniques and modern masses? What you describe tells nothing new about modernity. Like the prophets of old, you are simply repeating the Bible by destroying the idols and the fetishes of the masses!2 But the real touchstone of Benjamins paper is technique itself. The argument is barely presented as such. It is rather taken for granted, as an obvious statement, that the main function of technique is to reproduce an original mechanically -and with this common sense definition, comes what, in our view, is Benjamins second major category mistake. When he connects this wrong definition of technique as mechanical reproduction with his mistaken definition of the religious

This is quite a standard rhetorics in Marxism and postmarxist literature, and Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, constantly manipulates this two-edged sword. 2 The ambiguousness of the argument is very striking when Benjamin quotes Georges Duhamel (p.238-9) or Aldous Huxley (n.13 p.248), first assuming their critic of movie or modern technology, and then briefly denouncing it as reactionary: This mode of observation is obviously not progressive

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aura as the unreproducible presence of the original, he cannot miss his target: copy is a weak counterfeit of the original. The history of art, which Benjamin sums up briskly in two pages to support his argument, offers an excellent ground to make important points, which, one after the other, lead to the exact opposite of his own. First, technique is not a mechanical reproduction. Second, there is not such a thing as an original, which you can copy afterwards. And then, multiplication itself has absolutely no reason to be taken for an impoverishment--unless you have already accepted this hypothesis as a solid empirical result. Let us for instance follow Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, looking at the formation of modern taste for antique statues.3 When Italian discoverers pay attention to the old statues, they take them as evidences for the Antique perfection, and as tools for a reconstruction of an Italian identity. They do not care much for the aesthetic value of each of them, they do not pay much attention to the sculptors, they insist on the continuity between the past and the present, and they use the statues as active performers to connect themselves with the idea of Beauty. Without any respect towards any pretended aura, they restore them, they move them, they copy them. According to them, art is everything but a cult of pure originals: it is a flow of action. Haskell and Penny show very carefully how, on the contrary, little by little, copies have made the original. It will take three centuries to transform these lively means of relation with the past and with the others into fixed and untouchable originals--and it will take another century to push back these former original Roman statues into the waiting-room of an art more original than them, the Greek statuary The theme of authenticity has itself been a late by-product of a constant activity of reproduction, by every technical means which could be invented. The common sense view of art in the name of which Benjamin prophetizes its transformation into a mechanical reproduction is itself the result of a continuous technical reproduction. Ars means technique, and this fits much more with the constant obsession of artists with their technical means, than the opposition, invented by Benjamin, between art and mechanical reproduction. As soon as photographers have made photographs, far from trying to render them more realistic, they have aesthetized the myriad of technical choices necessary to produce prints, working on the quality of papers, on the optics, on the framing, etc4 Benjamin is as mistaken about movies as he is about photography. There is nothing mechanical in them. Nothing is less true than the stereotype about the movie actor as an immediate personality delivered to the public (p.231)--camera just adds a mediation to a long chain, it does not cut it; there is no more and no less real presence in the studio than on the stage, and there is as much technique in both actings. Every sound engineer knows that his technique produces music, and does not re-produce anything. Technique has always been an active means of
Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture. 1500-1900, 1981, New Haven and London, Yale University Press. 4 Cf. Raymonde Moulin, 1978, La gense de la raret artistique , in Ethnologie franaise, vol.8 n 2-3, mars-septembre 78, pp.241-258.
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production of art--and not the modern perversion of a former desincarnated creation. Benjamin is here the prisoner of the very Romantique idea which he wanted to criticize. If reproduction is an active recreation, and if technique is everything but mechanical, on the other side, multiplication is everything but a passive dissolution of the original authenticity into the reified consumption of fetishes. On the contrary, originality and authenticity suppose, as a sine qua non condition, the existence of an intense technical reproduction. The example of music shows it very clearly: first come infinite repetition, standards, schemes, variations, then come the works. There is no such a thing as a modern composer of unique works before our modern times. As late as 1750, each time Rameau gave a new series of one of his operas, he rewrites it for the occasion: it is only in the middle of the 20th century, for the needs of the record industry, that the question of establishing and choosing a stable version of Hippolyte or Dardanus has got any meaning at all. Before then, music was written to be played, composers copied, transcribed, repeated, corrected, adapted, in a continuous web of themes and harmonies. A very long work by many active publishers has been necessary to transform scores, from being tools for amateurs mixing many transcriptions for the sake of playing music together, into exact Urtext copies of an original piece written by a particular composer--which it had taken two or three generations of musicologists to finally produce5. And then, it needed a second long term transformation, carried out by the record industry, to produce a new market of amateurs, able to recognize Bach and Schubert as the original creators of their works. In the case of paintings, Svetlana Alpers has shown all the work and the strategic perspicacity it took for Rembrandt to transform himself into the author of his paintings--and all the painters after him.6 This point about the author has been made many times since, after Michel Foucaults famous article.7 Even if Benjamin could not know this new history of art and this new sociology of authorship, it is rather strange, nonetheless, how little Benjamin uses the case of books to illustrate this issue. But it is not so surprizing: if the enormous changes which printing has brought about in literature are a familiar story (p.218-9), again the story is not at all about the deperdition of the aura, but about the birth of the author and the new extension of his readership. More precisely, the example of printing would have most clearly shown the confusion made by Benjamin between the mechanical reproduction of a text, as a material support, and the multiplication of its readings: the former, far from

See Antoine Hennion. La passion musicale. Une sociologie de la mdiation, 1993. Paris, A.-M. Mtaili, . 6 See Svetlana Alpers Rembrandts Enterprise. The Studio and the Market, 1988, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. 7 What is an author?, 1977, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard ed., Ithaca, NY. Among others, Martha Woodmansee, Mark Rose, Carla Hesse and Jane C. Ginsburg have then questioned historically the 18th-century copyright issues, comparing France, England and Germany.

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preventing uniqueness and variety of the latter, is precisely what allows them. If, in an unique way, hic et nunc, I can read Othello, this particular piece of this original Shakespeare, it is not in spite of the billions of copies printed everywhere in the world, but because of them. We can see more clearly the paradox on which turns Benjamins argument about technique: he wants to give it back an active role, as if it had not. Against pretended idealists, he underlines the deep importance of our means of reproduction on the works which are produced. But, like the idealists against whom he fights, he himself does not give any positive role to the material presence of the supports, nor to the continuous work of technical repetition (whereas artists and audience continuously do). Hence his success: his text flatters both camps. He flatters materialists, because he pretends to reveal an hidden infra-structural basis under an idealistic story of art; but in the end he flatters idealists too (or the hidden idealist sleeping inside every materialist), because he presents the technicization of the world as a new mechanical deperdition of a past state of the art. A real materialist story would have to give back to the technique its role, not that of demoniac modern perversion of art but of its active producer. The format of this paper does not allow us to extend the demonstration on all the category mistakes cumulated by this strange text. But we would like to conclude briefly with a remark on economics and politics, because it generalizes to the Frankfurt School the point which we have tried to make about Benjamin. The mistake is the same: the German thinkers of the modern age have systematically pictured the modern masses, completely dominated by technical devices, as if they could be confused with the crowd8. Their fear --and they had good reasons to fear at the time-- of the uncontrolled fusion and immediacy of the crowd, has led them to confuse it with the technical and economical production of the masses. In doing so, they gained an audience, attracted by the dramatic painting of itself, but they put two enemies in the same camp, the American masses and the Nuremberg crowds. In spite of the apocalyptic vision which Adorno has traced of the mass market, the American masses have stopped the Nazis crowd. Nothing is more different, in sociology, than the technico-economical multiplication of goods and consumers exemplified in the mass-market and in their mass-media, on the one hand, and, on the other, the hot crowd, loosing its differences into the common crucible of an immediately shared space and time. Technique does not suppress distance: it creates it. Economy is about the production of an isolated consumption, limiting both the responsability of the buyer and of the supplier, to a precise transaction. It is not about the totalitarian fusion of every side of our activity into the immediate collective crowd which the Frankfurters had claimed to reveal hidden behind the quiet masses watching their television and doing their shopping in supermarkets In that sense, Benjamin was Marxist all right, he tried to reduce every order of reality to an unique vocabulary that, in spite of his economism, was borrowed from a political model.

Paul Yonnet. Jeux, modes et masses. , 1985, Paris, Gallimard.

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A new materialist scrutiny of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction would try, contrary to Benjamins, to avoid category mistakes and to rework the ever-changing definition of modernity. But because it would try to distinguish between the various modes of delegation in economics, religion, art, technique and politics, and because it would follow empirically the proliferation of mediations, it might not have the durable appeal of Benjamins text... appeal which is largely due, as we have shown, to the confusion it introduces and the complacent denunciation of modernity it allows.i