The Philosophy of Technology in the Frame of Film Theory: Walter Benjamin’s Contribution Dominique Chateau Many contemporary authors have been preoccupied by theoretical issues related to the context of media that has surrounded us since the beginning of the digital era, and because of which we will experience a period of transition that will last as long as digitization keeps developing and involving more and more aspects of our daily lives. However, what has already been changed and established provides a good basis for certain conjectures. One may wonder, for instance, if the new set of facts and ideas related to such technological transformations could possibly contribute in turn to the transformation of film theory and some of its key con- cepts. The persistence of cinema is indeed obvious: films are still being made as audiovisual works destined to entertain audiences, among other functions. It is nonetheless just as obvious that the digital revolution has had an important im- pact on this persistence. In the following, I will try to show how Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” can provide a serious ground of discussion for this issue, as it contains answers to a large number of questions raised by it. This does not mean that it would suffice to directly apply Benjamin’s propositions to the current situation. Indeed, those propositions have been regularly re-evaluated, not only with regard to their inter- nal logic, but also to their degree of relevance in the light of the different time periods in which they were reassessed. A collection of texts entitled The Work of Art in the Digital Age1 examines Benjamin’s arguments one by one and re-evaluates his propositions in the light of our digital modernity. I, for one, have given the aura concept a close examination, along with the argumentation from which it came.2 This led me to be more attentive to the concept of aestheticization and to realize that my opinion was not so much altered by the value of those previously studied arguments as it was by the viewpoint from which they had to be exam- ined. I then thought it would prove advantageous to abandon a strictly linear reading of“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and rather 29 consider the text as a network of concepts, whose interrelations offered an ex- emplary– and by no means intangible– matrix, which could be used to interpret the consequences of the invention of cinema and the advent of the digital revolu- tion. This being said, I am fully aware that studying this text requires certain transpositions, which a simple analysis of its title might already reveal, as my topic is not so much“the work of art” as films in general. Nevertheless, it is significant that Benjamin, instead of limiting the scope of his study to artistic films, takes into account the birth of new art forms, or at least of new more or less artistic forms of production which appeared in the context of the democrati- zation of culture and its accessibility to the masses. Neither is my topic about “technological reproducibility”– if reduced to analogical processes, at least– but about digital technology, which still involves analogy at the same time as it is based on a generalized digital coding of visual and auditory signals, since the digital transmission of a signal does not prevent the latter from appearing on a screen and, as such, requires a visual transcoding system and, for the viewer, an analogical decoding process. Last of all, when considering“Benjamin’s text,” one must think of it as a pa- limpsest, and not a single finished work. Indeed, which specific text is one con- sidering exactly? One of the two existing German versions or their French coun- terpart? All the versions were written in 1935-1936 and present very slight variations– whether small lacunas or alternative formulations. For convenience’s sake, I will mainly be referring to the second version of the text– unpublished during the author’s lifetime– translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, as it appears in the collection of Benjamin’s texts published by Harvard University Press.3 I will also be quoting from Benjamin’s own version in French,“L’Œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée,” in the Gallimard edition en- riched with paralipomena and variations, from“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Andy Blunden’s translation of this French version4 and, at last, from the French translation, which presents the German version of the text in its most complete form.5 The Benjaminian Matrix Benjamin’s essay is one of those singular texts which give the impression of being written as one reads along. Hence the feeling of rediscovery one gets at each rereading, because of some previously unnoticed difficulty or brilliant new idea. To my eyes, weary from pouring over“The Work of Art...” so many times, this feeling is due to the fact that Benjamin’s text not only accumulates a large number of ideas, not only interlaces a great number of themes in a sometimes chaotic argumentation, but also superimposes and disseminates several types of reflection one seldom finds associated with one another. The Reader may feel somewhat discouraged by the first part of the text– presented as a Preface in 30 dominique chateau certain versions– which seems to set him/her on a dubious path leading to the commonplace Marxist concept of the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure or, more simply put, of the relationship between culture– or art– and production. The reader may also be annoyed by the militant undertones which can be felt in the first pages– regarding the“revolutionary demands in the politics of art,”6 as opposed to those advocated by Fascism– and in the book’s final part– sometimes presented as an epilog– where, as an antidote to the aestheticization that Fascism is once again accused of, we find the proclama- tion:“Communism replies by politicizing art.” 7 It is obvious that such readers, judging the text in the light of their ideological prejudices– as they may well be antifascist and not necessarily Marxist– is liable to put down the book and read no further. That, however, would be a shame. Actually, any reader– whether ideologically biased or not– could be justified in feeling such discomfort: it is normal to see a divergence of opinion between one who looks at a glass as half-full and one who considers it half-empty, and it is above all the many difficulties contained in the first few pages that might be held responsible for the reader’s skepticism. The militant undertones we mentioned above accompany the first difficulty one comes across, as the book’s first theme – reproduction– is explored. The lateness of culture as compared to production is here mentioned in reference to the“capitalist mode of production” and the economic system of capitalism, which the“thesis defining the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production”8 should be con- nected to. What is at stake here is no less than the renewal of art theory, a renew- al which Benjamin wields as an antifascist weapon. Epistemology and ideology thus merge in a way that may seem irrelevant to an upholder of epistemological neutrality, and superfluous to an antifascist activist. The reader who dislikes questions of ideology will of course be reassured once the preface is over, as the political theme of capitalist production makes way for the technological issue of reproduction. In fact, it is precisely such a shift that the same reader– a bit fussy on epistemological matters– might want to criticize. Instead of trying to carry out an autopsy of Benjamin’s text, one should endea- vor to do justice to its persistent dynamism and accept its countless shifts from one form of argumentation to another, inasmuch as they succeed in simulta- neously establishing the dialectic of the text on several planes: that of technology and media theory, of art and cinema, of the history of human production, of cultural history, and finally, that of politics, both as theory and praxis. And here is our matrix, so to speak... As far as politics is concerned, one should also bear in mind the dramatic context with which the author was confronted at the time, and remember the odd analogies that Horkheimer and Adorno, while living in exile in the United States, both noted between the situations in their host country and that in Germany: the analogy, for instance, between the radio broadcasting of concerts conducted by Toscanini and of the Führer’s speeches.9 Retrospec- the philosophy of technology in the frame of film theory 31 tively, it is in no way surprising to observe that Marx and Engels, when they prophesized an end to the division of labor and announced that“in a communist society, there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities,”10 gave us a foretaste of the current postmodern discourse which keeps harping on about the fusion of art in the realm of culture, the advent of which, paradoxically enough, is considered as a result of the development and triumph of our liberal-capitalist society! To the multidisciplinary matrix of the various intellectual modalities through which Benjamin’s thought progresses, there corresponds the matrix of the themes which he tackles with remarkable freedom and an intellectual luxuriance that probably explains the fascination that Benjamin still exerts over us.