Visible and Invisible Sides of Reproduction

Boris Groys

Speculation is a word with at least two meanings. The first is "mirroring (46 & 206)," from the Latin speculum (mirror). Here speculation means a true reflection of reality that presents itself as an empirical fact. But speculation can also mean a reflection on reality that may be hidden behind its empirical image. In other words, speculation is a reflection on the mirror and not merely the reflection in the mirror. Speculation refers to the double character of any reproduction that has its visible and invisible sides. In the following I would like to speculate on the difference between modern (mechanical) and contemporary (53) (digital) forms of reflection/reproduction/speculation.

How original is our contemporaneity—is it merely a repetition of modernity and its innovations, projects, and frustrations? This question is equally relevant for contemporary art and politics. I believe that our contemporary time is, indeed, a repetition of modernity, but it is an original repetition, and it is radically different from the modern. I would like to analyze this difference by comparing two modes of reproduction: mechanical and digital.

The modern mode of reproduction is the mechanical. In his classic essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin famously assumed the possibility of perfect reproduction, which made it no longer possible to visually distinguish between an original and its copy. He then raised the question of whether the elimination of the visual distinction between original and copy meant the elimination of the distinction itself. As we know, Benjamin answered this question in the negative. The disappearance of the visual distinction between the original and the copy does not eliminate another—invisible, but for Benjamin no less real—distinction between them: the original has an aura that the copy does not. Benjamin's formulations are well known: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its here and now, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." He continues: "These 'here' and 'now' of the original constitute the concept of its authenticity, and lay basis for the notion of a tradition that has up to the present day passed this object along as something having a self and an identity." The copy, by contrast, is siteless, ahistorical: from the beginning it appears as potential multiplicity. Accordingly, for Benjamin photography and film are the most modern art forms. From their inception they are mechanically produced and destined for topologically undetermined circulation. In other words, they are originally copies. Thus, the age of mechanical reproduction cannot produce anything truly original—it can only eliminate the aura, or erase the originality of the originals, that it has inherited from the previous times.

At first glance, this claim of essential non-originality of modernity seems a bit strange, because the notion of originality was at the center of the modern culture and, especially, modernist art. Indeed, every serious artist of the avant-garde insisted on the originality of his or her art. However, their notion of originality was completely different from Benjamin's. He did not ask the question: how original—new, different—is an object compared to objects from the historical past? Rather, Benjamin was interested in the ability of the artwork to secure its originality for the future. For Benjamin, to be original means to be irreproducible. Originality is the relationship of the artwork not to the past, but to the future.

Benjamin's concept of originality is obviously rooted in his understanding of nature, because only the natural is supposed to be inimitable and irreproducible by technical means. Not accidentally, Benjamin uses the experience of being in the middle of a splendid Italian landscape as a model (27 & 75 & 130) of an auratic experience that cannot be reproduced without losing its "here and now." Even if Benjamin is ready to accept that nature can be technically reproduced and perfectly simulated on the level of its materiality and its visual form, he still insists on the impossibility to reproduce its inscription in the here and...