ROBERT F. NIDEFFER
http://tunisia.sdc.ucsb.edu/~nideffer/projects/AAA/theory.html

In his essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin claims that art, in principle, has always been reproducible, but that mechanical reproduction of art represents something new. By cataloguing core technologies enabling mass art making -- woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, photography, film -- he asserts a problematic relationship between patterns of production and dissemination, and conditions of consumption. Foreshadowing the sentiments of a number of more contemporary cultural critics he states that technical reproduction puts copies of originals out of reach of the original itself, depreciating the quality of its actual presence, or "aura." Indeed, even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art lacks the original's aura, due to the fact that its "unique existence at the place where it happens to be" is lost and because "the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of "authenticity" (220). Thus, in an age of mechanical reproduction authenticity becomes jeopardized, historical testimony suspect, and the author/ity of the art object -- detached from the domain of tradition -- called into question.

Guy Debord takes this notion of authentic loss a step further by arguing that in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, everything that was directly lived moves away into spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle provides the common ground for the deceived gaze and false consciousness, establishing a specious unification of an "official language of generalized separation." However, the spectacular is not merely the result of techniques of mass dissemination, but a Weltanschaung which stems from social relations among people, mediated through images, acting not as supplement to the real, but as the heart of what he calls the "unrealism" of the real society (points 1, 3-6). In a topsy-turvy world, "the true is a moment of the false" (point 9), and the spectacle degrades the once "concrete life of everyone" into a "speculative universe" (point 19). At the same time, spectacular subjugation of Men turns all individual reality into social reality, directly dependent upon and shaped by social power (point 17). In the Debordian universe, Man is further alienated from the conditions of his own production, in/effectively becoming a "foreigner" in his own land: "The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him" (point 30).

So what happens when the reproductive terrain of the spectacle moves from the mechanical to the digital? Judging from the way most media critics and academics are writing about new technologies, things only get worse, and the theoretical split between the virtual and the actual, the fictional and the factual, is only getting wider. Changes in reproductive technologies have presumably led to the implosion of representation and reality where simulacra come to replace the reality they once only signified. Jean Baudrillard's thesis (1988, 171) that 'simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance, it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreality' has become something of a post- late- modern mantra: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself ... " (1988, 167). Electronic and digital representation is perceived at one remove from previous representational connections between signification and referentiality. Because electronic space is all surface it cannot be inhabited. Because it disembodies instead of embodies, digital media "liberates" one from any deep structure of feeling and creates a free-floating and impersonal presence that is "dominated by a peculiar kind of "euphoria" (Sobchack 1993, 24).

It isn't too hard to find technological luddites who criticize digitally mediated experience because it establishes a discursive relationship with "nothing but an image," an identification held responsible for heralding a massively mediated migration into the realm of purely fictive or illusory appearances where truth has gone the way of empiricist reason, forcing an epistemological move to a point where there is no last ground of appeal to enlightenment values that once possessed an author/ity. But this discursive relationship is really nothing new. Artistic production, dissemination, and consumption has always been socially mediated, it is simply the display mechanisms and cultural contexts that change. It makes little difference whether one is producing the art, or viewing the art produced, the activity is perceptually encoded and symbolically interpreted on the basis of institutionally patterned practices filtered through physiological processes. What is the eye but an input device? The skin, but a screen mediating between the body and the socially over/determined "external" environment? Or vice-versa? The problem comes in failing to recognize that the real has never been anything but "simulated," and the simulated never anything less than "real." If one accepts this logic, reproduction by whatever means does little to the authenticity or aura of the art object, since the art object is always already imag(in)ed. Thus, instead of mourning the loss of some mythical Man in an unmediated "state of nature," or the disappearance of an art object's authenticity and aura due to its technically enabled reproduction, one might think about the ways in which reproductive technologies -- whether through touch, speech, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, or, most recently, computer -- can be used to place Man in an "unnatural state."

Roland Barthe's 1967 postmortem "The Death of the Author," as Craig Owens illustrates, rests on the assertion that the author can no longer (if indeed s/he ever could) claim to be the unique source of the meaning and/or value of the creative work. This declaration relies on two key propositions: first, that a text's coherence or unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination -- implying the reader/viewer is responsible for answering the question of meaning; and second, that it is through the codes and conventions of language that a work gets produced -- implying the author does not own or speak language, but is owned and spoken through language. (123-125). This perceived loss of authorial control (intimately tied to Debord's anxiety over the spectacle subjugating Men's individual reality into social reality, as well as Benjamin's melancholy over the absence of "aura," "authenticity," and "reliable For many readers, the more conservative of the two responses -- that the individualist subject is a thing of the past -- is frequently associated with tremendous apprehension and a heavy dose of nostalgia for "the way we were." Little is more unsettling than the notion that "reality just is whatever we make of it according to this or that predominant language game, discourse, or mode of signifying practice," which presumably casts one into a state of "terminal indifference with regard to truth and falsehood" (Norris 1991, 22-24), where, God forbid, Man is no longer Master of his own domain. These days, one need not listen hard to hear the increasingly familiar battle cry: "Give us back our Can(n)on! The fear that individualism has ceased to exist, that the author is not really in control of the process of production or, for that matter, the reader in the process of reception, often encourages a kind of un/critical retrenchment, a struggle to reassert a creative author/ity, a solitary agent and arbiter responsible for granting a work its authenticity, its aura, and its meaning.

Not surprisingly, the more radical response is even more threatening, for it suggests there never was such a thing as an individual, autonomous, subject. The dreaded implication is that not only are language, action, and consciousness out of our direct control, they are, and have never been anything but, collectively and institutionally predetermined for us. One does not speak one is spoken, one does not write one is written. One is, in these terms, decentered with a capital "DE," and, according to many, left with very little, if any, critical space. If for an art work to have aura, authenticity, and meaning it must be temporally and spatially fixed, and creatively localized at the individual level independent of social circumstance, then the death of bourgeois subjectivity is not, at least from a High-Modernist standpoint, a very welcome event. Following this line of reasoning, for artists using digital media, where temporal and spatial boundaries are even more thoroughly destabilized, and where divisions between production and consumption are further imploded, things only seem to get worse.

But the picture need not be so bleak. The ways in which digital media bring to the fore Jameson's more "radical" -- what he and many others label the "post-structural" -- position, helping to hilight the socially constructed nature of the "real," could be considered a socially responsible and productive development, for it, as more than a few feminist scholars have pointed out, denaturalizes the Natural, and calls into question oppressive and exclusionary cultural practices that have remained invisible for far too long. If one embraces this point of view, as Owens asserts, the critical questions should quickly become, "Where do exchanges between readers and viewers take place?" and "Who is free to define, manipulate and, ultimately, to benefit from the codes and conventions of cultural production?" The answers, he claims, are to be found by shifting attention away from the work and its producer, and onto the frame -- in the first case "by focusing on the location in which the work gets encountered," and in the second, contrary to much of what has been argued, "by insisting on the social nature of artistic production and reception" (126). By altering the focus in these ways, artists, buyers, dealers, critics, and public, can reclaim a certain agency, perhaps even "employ, rather than simply being employed by, the apparatus we all ... are threaded through" (136).

159 different countries are now capable of logging on to the Net. It's estimated that over 100,000 electronic bulletin boards and newsgroups are scattered throughout the globe, that more than 7,000 live chat-lines are currently operating, and that over 30 million people are using the Internet (not including the 6 million or so who subscribe to commercial services such as America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve, and the like); and it's all growing at an astronomical rate. The World-Wide-Web, the latest information service to arrive on the Internet, expanded 1,713 percent in 1994 (down from the 443,931 percent it increased in 1993). According to recent estimates, by 1997, the total Internet market -- including software, hardware and services -- will reach $4.2 billion (Business Week 4/3/95 p.118), while the number of Internet hosts is expected to top 100 million by the turn of the century (Wired 3.01:38). Clearly, something is happening out in the digital domain. Creation and distribution are being fundamentally transformed. The broader implications of this transformation are only beginning to be theorized. It's not simply, as many media pundits claim, a shift from "broadcast" to "narrowcast" or "pointcast" where corporate powers target individuals as opposed to collectives, and where individuals presumably have more power in determining their needs, or at the very least, their desires. Digital media opens up new horizons of possibilities.

Several hundred years after the advent of the printing press it still remains difficult for the average citizen to publish a book. The same exclusivity holds true for cinema and television -- far more people consume than produce. Now however, with the advent of personal computers and relatively affordable and available Internet access, it is much easier and more feasible to create, disseminate, and appropriate text, image, and sound-based materials. For quite some time now artists have been able to paint, sculpt, photograph, or film. But the distribution network of those materials has, by and large, been rather restricted. But thanks to the magic of binary encoding, and the rapid proliferation of gateways to the electronic infrastructure, digital artists can now place their projects on the Internet and have an instant potential audience of millions. Suddenly, those with a vested interest in maintaining a rigid dichotomy between author and audience, producer and consumer, become much more threatened. When information can be stored and retrieved as electronic pulses, dynamically acted upon in real time and re-transmit round the globe at near the speed of light, notions of copyright and ownership no longer have the same meaning. New technologies create new questions and demand new answers. We are just beginning to realize that neither the labor involved in accumulating data nor the data itself come within the reach of what are now outmoded legal frameworks (Branscomb 1994). It goes without saying, this is a big problem for some.

In 1791, the First Amendment, included in the Bill of Rights, was ratified by the States and became law. In a nutshell, the purpose of the First Amendment was, and remains, to ensure that mass-media are able to criticize the actions of government officials, inform the citizenry about public affairs, and grant individuals the freedom of religion, speech, association, privacy, and artistic expression. The responsibility of the individual to the collective, and the ability of the collective (or representatives of the collective) to censure the individual, is clearly a complicated issue. There is an inescapable dimension of public interest in virtually all private action, and every epoch has its own set of political tensions that must be worked out for the preservation of the social whole. The issue of the moment is Senate Bill 314, the Exon/Gorton Amendment (a.k.a. "The Communications Decency Act)" which represents the government's latest attempt to determine what is, and what is not, appropriate material to distribute through the Internet. In a rather ominous turn of events, the bill was adopted as an amendment to the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1995. The amendment subjects online users to scrutiny and criminal penalties if their messages are determined to be indecent, lewd, lascivious or filthy -- all communications that are protected by the Free Speech Guarantees of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. As it currently stands, if you run a BBS, where many thousands of users log on each day to upload and download countless megabytes of digital media, you are held responsible for the content of the transmission, not the person transmitting. This is a bit like MCI or AT&T being held responsible for whatever gets said on a telephone simply because they provide the trunk-lines.

Undoubtedly the Net will become increasingly privatized, and operate under the aegis of more formally integrated corporate control. Sheer economics has been the driving force behind much of our moral justifications for censure, while a highly developed discourse of consumerism has tended to displace the discourse of public interest in arena after arena (Smith 1993, 51). The brute market force of the industry will continue to propel technology forward, just as morally suspect and artistically questionable materials disseminated through that technology will continue to reproduce. The underground will thrive, though it will likely become more of an informal economy, and the free-wheeling and anarchic structure that has been the legacy of the Internet since its inception will probably soon be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, the discursive terrain has been radically reconfigured. New technologies demand new languages, new grammars, and force alternative ways of "being" in the world. With regard to the phenomenology of what many currently call "the virtual," those languages and grammars have barely begun to develop.

Mechanical reproduction, and its digital progeny, does have certain advantages. For instance, in Benjamin's terms, as soon as authenticity ceased being the sole criteria for assessing art (problematic though this was for the reasons sketched out earlier), art could be liberated from its dependence on ritual, allowing art and politics to come together. No longer restricted to the domain of elite artisans, a captive cult, or exhibition, art becomes available to the masses (224). Within the digital sphere this transformation is even more remarkable, for not only is access increasingly democratized, but so is artistic and authorial re/construction. We produce in the act of consumption, and consume in the act of production, changing institutions and institutionally patterned practices simply by virtue of acting in them and reacting to them. The relationship between structure and agency is, and has always been, a dialectical one, even though the arrow of influence has historically pointed heavier in one direction than it has in the other. But for the moment, at least while online, this arrow has evened out, as traditionally rigid institutional hierarchies get flattened in their reformation into little 1's and 0's. Jane Doe's virtual footprint now has the potential to make as large a mark as any corporate conglomeration's. Yet this remains a relatively weak position to occupy, operating as a kind of default, often irrespective of any predetermined intent. As such, it does little to encourage strategic interventions into ever more massively mediated spaces.

The question of the hour is "What kind of critical practice or political agency does digital art making demand?" What follows is a preliminary sketch of a deliberately partial answer, a kind of post-organic call to (prosthetic) arms. Artists working in the electronic environment must be capable of touching down and propagating through networks and nodes, in effort to, as Deleuze and Guattari encourage, increase the territories of political space through a kind of rhizomatic de- and re-territorialization," building new assemblages along continuums of constant variation and modification, avoiding orientation toward a culmination point or end, but instead remaining always in the middle, between (1987,11-25). We must transgress formal closures, repurpose images, denature given sign systems, question the cultural myths, and problematize the activity of reference (Foster 1983, 199). The digital artist-as-virus, needs to harbor a viral consciousness, a mutative consciousness, making small-scale interventions that hold the potential for rapid reproduction and systemic destabilization ...

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Baudrillard, Jean. 1987. The Ecstasy of Communication. Bernard and Caroline Schutze (trans.), Sylvere Lotringer (ed.). New York: Semiotext(e).

Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1955. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Pp. 217-251 in Illuminations. Hannah Arendt (ed.). New York: Schocken Books.

Branscomb, Anne Wells. 1994. Who Owns Information? From Privacy To Public Access. New York: BasicBooks.

Business Week. April 3, 1995, 118.

Debord, Guy. 1979. "Separation Perfected." Excerpted from The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: The Red and Black Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foster, Hal "Re: Post." 1983. Pp. 189-201 in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Brian Wallis (ed.). New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jameson, Frederic. 1983. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society. Pp. 111-125 in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Hal Foster (ed.). Washington: Bay Press.

Norris, Christopher. 1991. Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Owens, Craig. 1992. "From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After the Death of the Author?" Pp. 122-139 in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Scott Bryson et. al. (eds.). Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Smith, Anthony. 1993. Books to Bytes: Knowledge and Information in the Postmodern Era. London: British Film Institute.

Sobchack, Vivian. 1993. "Materiality and Technologic: A Phenomenological Meditation on the Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic," abridged from "The Scene Of The Screen." Pp. 17-20 in Materialities of Communication. H.U. Gumbrecht (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Wired. 3.01, 38.

Ibid, 38.

Wired. 3.03, 42.