Paul Valéry, Pièces sur l’art, Paris [undated],

  pp. 103–4 (‘La Conquête de l’ubiquité’)

  Foreword

  When Marx set out to analyse the capitalist mode of production, that mode of production was in its infancy. Marx so ordered his endeavours that they acquired prognosticative value. Looking back at the basic circumstances of capitalist production, he presented them in such a way as to show what capitalism might be thought capable of in years to come. What emerged was that it might not only be thought capable of increasingly severe exploitation of proletarians; ultimately, it may even bring about conditions in which it can itself be done away with.

  The transformation of the superstructure, which proceeds far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to bring out the change in the conditions of production in all spheres of civilization. Only now can the form that this has assumed be revealed. Of those revelations, certain prognosticative demands need to be made. However, such demands will be met not so much by theses concerning the art of the proletariat after it has seized power, let alone that of the classless society, as by theses concerning how art will tend to develop under current conditions of production. The dialectic of such tendencies makes itself no less apparent in the super-structure than in the economy. It would be wrong, therefore, to underestimate the combative value of such theses. They oust a number of traditional concepts – such as creativity and genius, everlasting value and secrecy – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at the moment scarcely controllable) application leads to a processing of the facts along the lines of Fascism. The following concepts, here introduced into art theory for the first time, differ from more familiar ones in that they are quite useless for the purposes of Fascism. They can, on the other hand, be used to formulate revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

  I

  In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again. Such copying was also done by pupils as an artistic exercise, by masters in order to give works wider circulation, ultimately by anyone seeking to make money. Technological reproduction of the work of art is something else, something that has been practised intermittently throughout history, at widely separated intervals though with growing intensity. The Greeks had only two processes for reproducing works of art technologically: casting and embossing. Bronzes, terracottas, and coins were the only artworks that they were able to manufacture in large numbers. All the rest were unique and not capable of being reproduced by technological means. It was wood engraving that made graphic art technologically reproducible for the first time; drawings could be reproduced long before printing did the same for the written word. The huge changes that printing (the technological reproducibility of writing) brought about in literature are well known. However, of the phenomenon that we are considering on the scale of history here they are merely a particular instance – though of course a particularly important one. Wood engraving is joined in the course of the Middle Ages by copperplate engraving and etching, then in the early nineteenth century by lithography.

  With lithography, reproductive technology reaches a radically new stage. The very much speedier process represented by applying a drawing to a stone as opposed to carving it into a block of wood or etching it on to a copperplate enabled graphic art, for the first time, to market its products not only in great numbers (as previously) but also in different designs daily. Lithography made it possible for graphic art to accompany everyday life with pictures. It started to keep pace with printing. However, in these early days it was outstripped, mere decades after the invention of lithography, by photography. With photography, in the process of pictorial reproduction the hand was for the first time relieved of the principal artistic responsibilities, which henceforth lay with the eye alone as it peered into the lens. Since the eye perceives faster than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was so enormously speeded up that it was able to keep pace with speech. The film operator, turning the handle in the studio, captures the images as rapidly as the actor speaks. While in lithography the illustrated magazine was present in essence, in photography it was the sound film. The technological reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last [nineteenth] century. These convergent endeavours rendered foreseeable a situation that Paul Valéry described in the sentence: ‘Just as water, gas, and electric power come to us from afar and enter our homes with almost no effort on our part, there serving our needs, so we shall be supplied with pictures or sound sequences that, at the touch of a button, almost a wave of the hand, arrive and likewise depart.’2 Around 1900 technological reproduction had reached a standard at which it had not merely begun to make the totality of traditional artworks its subject, altering their effect in the most profound manner; it had gained a place for itself among artistic modes of procedure. As regards studying that standard, nothing is more revealing than how its twin manifestations – reproduction of the work of art and the new art of cinematography – redound upon art in its traditional form.

  II

  Even with the most perfect reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in the place where it is now. But it is on that unique existence and on nothing else that the history has been played out to which during the course of its being it has been subject. That includes not only the changes it has undergone in its physical structure over the course of time; it also includes the fluctuating conditions of ownership through which it may have passed.3 The trace of the former will be brought to light only by chemical or physical analyses that cannot be carried out on a reproduction; that of the latter forms the object of a tradition, pursuit of which has to begin from the location of the original.

  The here and now of the original constitute the abstract idea of its genuineness. Analyses of a chemical nature carried out on the patina of a bronze may help to establish its genuineness; similarly, proof that a particular medieval manuscript stems from a fifteenth-century archive may help to establish its genuineness. The whole province of genuineness is beyond technological (and of course not only technological) reproducibility.4 But whereas in relation to manual reproduction (the product of which was usually branded a forgery of the original) genuineness retains its full authority, in relation to reproduction by technological means that is not the case. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, technological reproduction is more autonomous, relative to the original, than is manual reproduction. In photography, for instance, it is able to place greater emphasis on aspects of the original that can be accessed only by the lens (adjustable and selecting its viewpoint arbitrarily) and not by the human eye, or it is able to employ such techniques as enlargement or slow motion to capture images that are quite simply beyond natural optics. That is the first reason. Secondly, it can also place the copy of the original in situations beyond the reach of the original itself. Above all, it makes it possible for the original to come closer to the person taking it in, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record. A cathedral quits its site to find a welcome in the studio of an art lover; a choral work performed in a hall or in the open air can be heard in a room.

  Even if the circumstances into which the technological reproduction of the work of art may be introduced in no way impair the continued existence of the work otherwise, its here and now will in any case be devalued. And if that by no means applies to the work of art alone but also, mutatis mutandis, to a landscape (for instance) that in a film slides past the viewer, as a result of that process a supremely sensitive core in the object of art is affected that no natural object possesses in the same degree of vulnerability. That is its genuineness. The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears. The latter (material duration and historical witness) being grounded in the former (the thing’s genuineness), what happens in the reproduction, where the former has been removed from human perception, is that the latter also starts to wobble. Nothing else, admittedly; however, what starts to wobble thus is the authority of the thing.5

  We can encapsulate what stands out here by using the term ‘aura’. We can say: what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura. The process is symptomatic; its significance points beyond the realm of art. Reproductive technology, we might say in general terms, removes the thing reproduced from the realm of tradition. In making many copies of the reproduction, it substitutes for its unique incidence a multiplicity of incidences. And in allowing the reproduction to come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in, it actualizes what is reproduced. These two processes usher in a mighty upheaval of what is passed on – an upheaval of tradition that is the verso of the current crisis and renewal of mankind. They are intimately bound up with the mass movements of our day. Their most powerful agent is film. Even in its most positive form (indeed, precisely therein) the social significance of film is unthinkable without this destructive, this cathartic side: namely, liquidation of the value of tradition in cultural heritage. This phenomenon is at its most tangible in major historical films. It is drawing more and more positions into its sphere. And when Abel Gance exclaimed excitedly in 1927: ‘Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films […] All legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religions – all religions, indeed […] await their filmed resurrection, and the heroes are pressing at the gates,’6 he was calling (doubtless without meaning to) for a comprehensive liquidation.

  III

  Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of being of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense perception. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it occurs, is dictated not only naturally but also historically. The time of the migration of peoples, in which the late-Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis came into being, had not only a different art than the Ancient World but also a different perception. The scholars of the Vienna School, Riegl and Wickhoff, who rebelled against the weight of the classical tradition beneath which the art of that period lay buried, were the first to hit on the idea of drawing from that tradition inferences regarding the organization of perception in the age when it enjoyed currency. Far-reaching though their findings were, they were limited by the fact that these researchers contented themselves with revealing the formal signature that characterized perception in the late-Roman period. They did not try (and possibly could not even aspire) to reveal the social upheavals that found expression in those changes of perception. So far as the present is concerned, conditions are more favourable to such an insight. And if changes in the medium of perception occurring in our own day may be understood as a fading of aura, the social conditions of that fading can be demonstrated.

  Perhaps we should illustrate the term ‘aura’ as proposed above for historical objects by the concept of an ‘aura’ of natural objects. The latter we define as a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close it may be. Lying back on a summer’s afternoon, gazing at a mountain range on the horizon or watching a branch as it casts its shadow over our reclining limbs, we speak of breathing in the aura of those mountains or that branch. It is not hard, given such a description, to see how much the current fading of aura depends upon social conditions. That fading has to do with two circumstances, both of which are connected with the increasing significance of the masses in present-day life. The fact is: ‘Bringing things closer’ in both spatial and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses7 as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction. There is no denying that we see evidence every day of the need to apprehend objects in pictures (or rather in copies, in reproductions of pictures) from very close to. And there is no mistaking the difference between the reproduction (such as illustrated papers and weekly news round-ups hold in readiness) and pictures. Uniqueness and duration are as tightly intertwined in the latter as are transience and reiterability in the former. Stripping the object of its sheath, shattering the aura, bear witness to a kind of perception where ‘a sense of similarity in the world’ is so highly developed that, through reproduction, it even mines similarity from what happens only once. For instance, we are starting to see in the visual field what in the field of theory is emerging as the growing importance of statistics. The orientation of reality towards the masses and of the masses towards reality is a process of unbounded consequence not only for thought but also for the way we see things.

  IV

  The singularity of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition. Tradition itself is of course something very much alive, something extraordinarily changeable. A classical statue of Venus, for example, occupied a different traditional context for the Greeks, who made of it an object of worship, than for medieval clerics, who saw it as a threatening idol. But what both were equally struck by was its singularity or, to use another word, its aura. The original way in which the work of art was embedded in the context of tradition was through worship. The oldest works of art, as we know, came into being in the service of some ritual – magical at first, then religious. Now it is crucially important that this auratic mode of being of the work of art never becomes completely separated from its ritual function.8 To put it another way: The ‘one-of-a-kind’ value of the ‘genuine’ work of art has its underpinnings in the ritual in which it had its original, initial utility value. No matter how indirectly, this is still recognizable even in the most profane forms of the service of beauty as a secularized rite.9 The profane service of beauty that emerged with the Renaissance and remained significant for three hundred years thereafter did eventually, at the end of that time, following the first major upheaval to assail it, clearly reveal those foundations. What happened was: when, with the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, namely photography (simultaneously with the dawn of Socialism), art felt a crisis approaching that after a further century became unmistakable, it reacted with the theory of l’art pour l’art, which constitutes a theology of art. From it there proceeded, in the further course of events, almost a negative theology in the form of the idea of a ‘pure’ art that rejected not only any kind of social function but also any prompting by an actual subject. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to reach this position.)

  Paying proper attention to these circumstances is indispensable for a view of art that has to do with the work of art in an age when it can be reproduced by technological means. The reason is that they pave the way for what is here the crucial insight: its being reproducible by technological means frees the work of art, for the first time in history, from its existence as a parasite upon ritual. The reproduced work of art is to an ever-increasing extent the reproduction of a work of art designed for reproducibility.10 From a photographic plate, for instance, many prints can be made; the question of the genuine print has no meaning. However, the instant the criterion of genuineness in art production failed, the entire social function of art underwent an upheaval. Rather than being underpinned by ritual, it came to be underpinned by a different practice: politics.

  V

  Works of art are received and adopted with different points of emphasis, two of which stand out as being poles of each other. In one case the emphasis is on the work’s cultic value; in the other, on its display value.11, 12 Artistic production begins with images that serve cultic purposes. With such images, presumably, their presence is more important than the fact that they are seen. The elk depicted by the Stone Age man on the walls of his cave is an instrument of magic. Yes, he shows it to his fellows, but it is chiefly targeted at the spirits. Today this cultic value as such seems almost to insist that the work of art be kept concealed: certain god statues are accessible only to the priest in the cella, certain Madonna images remain veiled almost throughout the year, certain carvings on medieval cathedrals cannot be seen by the spectator at ground level. As individual instances of artistic production become emancipated from the context of religious ritual, opportunities for displaying the products increase. The displayability of a portrait bust, which is capable of being sent all over the place, exceeds that of a god statue, whose fixed place is inside the temple. The displayability of the panel painting is greater than that of the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And if a setting of the mass is not inherently any less displayable than a symphony, nevertheless the symphony emerged at the point in time when it looked like becoming more so than the mass.

  With the various methods of reproducing the work of art technologically, this displayability is so enormously increased that, much as in primeval times, the quantitative shift between its two poles switches to a qualitative change in its nature. In primeval times, you see, because of the absolute weight placed on its cultic value, the work of art became primarily an instrument of magic that was only subsequently, one might say, acknowledged to be a work of art. Today, in the same way, because of the absolute weight placed on its display value, the work of art is becoming an image with entirely new functions, of which the one we are aware of, namely the artistic function, stands out as one that may subsequently be deemed incidental.13 This much is certain, that currently photography and its issue, film, provide the most practical implementation of this discovery.