"Benjamin's Desktop: Unpacking the Phenomenon of Literature Online"

In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin was led to exclaim, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (221). This essay itself is heavily tilted towards a focus on works of visual, rather than literary art; how film and photography were ushering in a new era, as of the first half of century XX. This era transformed aesthetic emphasis from the “presence” of a work of art’s “unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220), which manifested an auratic glow or sheen, and new techniques that opened up potentially broader (if also cheapening) vistas. To make a cross-reference, Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library” treats rare books as if they are capable of emitting a potent aura, just from the spaces they are able to fill in the acquisitive psyches of those who collect them. The import of the two essays, when conflated and applied to the present moment in literature, is that what print books can create is auratic presence; and that this is what the Internet specifically denies. Internet reproduction of literary artifacts is “digital,” rather than “mechanical”; however, the net result is more or less the same; “presence” is diminished along with “aura,” and the acquisitive impulse may be starved. The Internet, like film almost a century ago, opens a vista that it could be construed as “broad” or “cheap.” The work of literature in the age of digital reproduction needs to be investigated, specifically because in diminishing the aura of print books, what consequences will follow are hanging in the balance.

“Digital reproduction,” when applied to literature, is a strange phenomenon. On one level, all it means is that a web-page containing a poem, essay, or story, will look the same to all who venture to gaze upon it. However, what is produced and reproduced on the Net will often seem to follow a diasporic pattern: it will start in a digital locale, and then migrate to another digital locale, in such a way that one’s feelings and reactions to the piece may be transformed by how and where they are seeing it. The “aura” of the piece is only present to the extent that some constituent element of the substance of the piece itself grounds it temporally, makes it part and parcel of a Zeitgeist. It must be looked into how much of Benjamin’s sense of the “auratic” nature of print books is an illusory and inessential collector’s conceit. There is no reason to assume that websites do not create and maintain, over periods of time, their own auras. Benjamin’s notion of “aura” is bound up in materiality; what the Internet imposes on Net-readers is the dissipation of material and materialistic impulses. The materialistic essence of century XX may be about to be replaced by a renascence to spirituality in this century. The “unique existence” of works of literature “at the place where (they) happen to be” (220) will encourage us not to find an aura in this literature as a material object, but to forge a chiasmus between the unique existence that inheres in the literature and a reciprocally unique existence it engenders in us. Benjamin sees the auratic as a form of Otherness; what the Net imposes takes this Otherness and forces a radical subjectivity onto it, by de-objectifying it and demystifying its materiality. Thus, the relationship we forge gets us over the hurdle of material acquisitiveness.

This will register to some as a loss. If there were not compensatory excitements, in an age that demands sensory stimulation, then it is unlikely that literature on the Net could be considered “phenomenal.” The compensatory excitements the Net offers for the loss of materiality and (ostensible) permanence are stunning. The aura around the Net itself involves danger, risk, heedlessness; the Net paradigm insists on Net practitioners upping certain antes, as though the Net were a kind of gambling den. The aura that has accrued to literature on the Net must, of course, shift and transmute over time, but the present moment (and the Net, with its tinge of American ideology, insists on the intermittent preponderance of present moments) is steeped in Net practice working, both for writers and readers, as a kind of intoxicant. “Fast, fluid, and without boundaries” is a level and prescription of, not only the American but the Romantic— the “I” that belongs (through mutual empathy) to everyone, and forges instantaneous connections. So that the compensatory excitement of forging instantaneous connections is one frisson the Net offers. It is reminiscent of Barthes’ discussion of wine in “Mythologies”: “it is above all a converting substance, capable of reversing situations and states, and extracting from objects their opposites— for instance, making a weak man strong or a silent one talkative” (58). The pleasures of print are restrained pleasures; the wait of a period of months or years, the solidity of the material object once it arrives, its auratic presence on a shelf with other titles of a similar nature or from a similar source. If gratification is perpetually delayed, where print is concerned, creating a sense of permanent deferral from present moments, then the Internet creates moments intensely lived, that engender more expectations of intensely lived moments. If the Net can, as wine, “deliver (us) from myths, remove some of (our) intellectualism…make (us) the equal of the proletarian” (59), then perhaps the Net even has its own version of vino veritas: the frisson of sudden, unlabored truth.

It should go without saying that, if literature on the Net were not a subject that had a good amount of heft, where nuances and complications were concerned, it would not be worth writing about. Bataille’s name for the general overabundance of life on earth, the “accursed share,” also supplies a necessary wedge into the subject. Literature has proved, over a long period of time, that it does not need the Net to validate it. It is true of literary society as well as society in general that it “produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it” (Bataille, 106). So it is with literature on the Net: the surplus quality of Net publishing will be determined by how (and why) it is used. One possible use for literature on the Net, and also the investigation of the Net as a process, is that it can function as an antidote to the atrophied armature of post-modern thought that still hangs over avant-gardists on two continents. Post-modern poetics, especially in America, has always favored indeterminacy as a mode of expression; but I use the term “atrophied” because this kind of poetics has become closed on indeterminacy. Poetry, which has as a component part of its function the imperative to engage emotional and psychological levels, when made indeterminate as to at least some connotations, is only a few notches past banality. Net processes open indeterminacy up for investigation, by being determinative; you are in this place, doing this, and hiding is not an option. If a crisis forces you to react, the impulse towards banality cannot be followed. The Internet opens up vistas for psychologies and emotions to develop, beyond theoretical baggage. It could be the therapeutic solution to the traumas of post-modern practice, for those still young enough and dynamic enough to make moves.

Importantly, the Net is not nihilistic. It signifies mobility, which is a mode and expression of belief (i.e. you move because you believe it is worth your while to move). There is and has always been a kind of nihilism to poetry books; they do not sell, they signify failure. Poetry as a commodity is, and has always been, with rare exceptions like Byron, a failure. Of all the literary art forms that can benefit from Net processes and exposure, poetry stands to gain the most. The nihilism of waiting, say, two years for a poetry book to come out in print that few will buy or read can be supplanted if the publishing imperative is made dual, and remains that way. It remains to be seen to what extent print becomes nihilistic for the whole of literature. It would be reasonable to assert that literature that does not at least acknowledge the Net as a vital new force is already veering towards nihilism. Of course, the post-modern impulse had much to do with what could be termed (to be blunt) “happy nihilism,” the gleeful pursuit of no significations. As such, it may be seen that the real “Lyrical Ballads” of a new form and era of Romanticism is the emergence of the Internet itself. It is also important for me to underline the facticity of the Net; it is popular enough not to need specific artists to proselytize for it. But it would be a supreme irony if post-modernity itself were toppled by a forward moving and thinking technology. It would also be a more sophisticated irony than most post-modernists could come up with themselves. As is rare with potent ironies, it ends in earnest triumph.

Adam Fieled


Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share Volume I. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.