From reproduction to reproducibility

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Notes

An earlier version of parts of section iii appeared in “Glass Before its Time, Premature Iron: The Unforeseeable Futures of Technology in Benjamin's Arcades Project,” New Formations 54 (winter 2004–05)..

1. For an analysis of recent approaches in cultural theory that function in these terms see Graham MacPhee, The Architecture of the Visible, chapter 2.

2. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future 170.

3. See MacPhee, Architecture of the Visible, chapter 2, esp. 72–76, 100–03.

4. Arendt, The Human Condition 3–4; hereafter cited as HC.

5. Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” A sense of the warmth of their friendship, and of Benjamin's appreciation of Arendt's intellect, can be gleaned from Benjamin's letters; see Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940 596, 601. Arendt was, of course, the editor of the first selection of Benjamin's essays in English, Illuminations, published in 1968. This highly influential collection follows the 1955 Suhrkamp selection of Benjamin's writing edited by Adorno, which includes only the third version of the Work of Art essay.

6. See esp. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel and The Human Spirit. For an account of Hegel's engagement with politics and technology, see Fine, Political Investigations.

7. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 253–63.

8. “Pessimism” is used here in a technical rather than capricious sense: it is not that Arendt foresees a future decline within an open interpretative paradigm, but rather that the interpretative categories she puts in place seal the future as a “fate” that is non-negotiable.

9. Cf. The Origins of Totalitarianism 301–02: in the retrospective light of The Human Condition, the threat of an exponentially increasing population of superfluous people risks appearing automatic – literally built in to modern technology.

10. HC 137; for Arendt's account of the political as revelatory see HC 178–88.

11. For Benjamin, in contrast, the decay of tradition does not straightforwardly erase the origin of art in ritual, but gives it a new and unexpected significance: see Selected Writings, vol. 3, 105–06; cited hereafter as SW.

12. Benjamin, SW 104.

13. For a fuller consideration of “aura” see Graham MacPhee, “Technology, Time and the Return of Abstract Painting.”

14. Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin 157.

15. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin 96. The argument presented here draws on Caygill's rereading of Benjamin's thinking in terms of a “transcendental but speculative philosophy” (4).

16. Just as the significance of creativity for Benjamin's thinking of technology has tended to be ignored in anglophone cultural theory, so conversely has the importance of technology for his thinking of creativity. Thus, in his “Infinite Spaces” Marc Cauchi fails to consider the complexity of Benjamin's account of technology, seeing only the reductive opposition of “the bourgeois logic of eternal recurrence” and a “creation ex nihilo” (24).

17. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 320.

18. HC 198; for Arendt's account of the social see HC 22–73.

19. Notwithstanding Arendt's later insistence on the purity of politics, part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Imperialism,” locates the reformulation of modern politics within the spatial and temporal organization of the globe: see esp. 123–57.

20. Kant's formulation of morality as an “ought” is the subject of Hegel's sustained critique: for a statement of this critique see Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, sect. 618, 374–75. Arendt's “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959) and On Revolution (1963) both indicate that in the significant instance of the USA, her account of the “republic” proves unable to sustain the analysis of the involvement of the “internal” space of politics in the reformulation of the globe begun in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

21. “Critique of Violence” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 236–52. For a critique of Benjamin's essay see Caygill, Walter Benjamin 27–29.