At the beginning of his Returning to Benjamin. Art in the Age of AI (MACK, 2025), Victor Burgin asks if the digital reproducibility, finally, makes true and real the confidence that Walter Benjamin expressed in his seminal and influential The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, in the middle of the Thirties. Benjamin had as reference the vivid experience of Tatlin and the other Constructivist artists during the October, when these artists were daily engaged to challenge the hiatus between art and work transforming both sides of that dialectic. Cinema, or better the medium of the cinema itself, for Benjamin, could be the most inventive and explosive weapon to awake masses and to trigger a radical change in behavior and consciousness, just because of its permeability due the familiarity that this new medium shared between the people, included those that never entered in a museum. Burgin recalls that André Malraux – once a communist and engagé writer – then a minister for the general De Gaulle, wrote an important book – criticized without forget to underline his merits by Merleau-Ponty – called Le Musée Imaginaire (1947), in which he brings in light that the possibility to reproduce the masterpieces of the history of art – well closed and enclosure within the walls that separate the everyday life in the streets and the auratic artworld – gave the chance to everyone to create his/her own museum. Actually, Malraux – just sketched by Burgin – to precise that the photographic reproducibility of paintings and artworks modifies the spectatorship gaze and the notion of masterpiece. La photo is a medium that makes broader the audience of pieces of art but, at the same time, it introduces another modification. 

“Elle substitue souvent l’oeuvre significative au chef-d’oeuvre et le plaisir de connaître à celui d’admirer”. 

The hypothetical or supposed democratization produced by mass media, already, implies a problematic framework, because the photography, according to Malraux, organizes the artworks in a sequence, a frame “selon un style”, that means: standardizing them. The photographic reproducibility of Raphael or Ingres, writes Malraux, re-orients the way to see art, the relationship between the dead and us, what Malraux calls “Dialogue des Grands Morts”, our liason with artists. The photographic reproducibility “modifier ce dialogue”, suggesting another kind of hierarchy (word chosen by Malraux). The flaming color of Rubens becomes “un monde fermé” once it has been paged in a book or catalogue.  It’s true, following again Malraux, that a certain shooing, a “cadrage”, a photographic point of view can add something new, precious, and auratic to that sculpture or painting, for example “un accent impérieux”, due to its medium and conventions, but at the same time there’s a subtle transformation that maybe disturbers Malraux. Indeed, the development of the photographic reproducibility shares among a large audience a format that put the artworks, that are different between them, on the same level: the artworks “perdent leur échelle”. The art object are photographed and framed, reproduced within a (technological) pattern. Marshall McLuhan, some years later, will say that: the medium is the message. The medium of the photographic reproducibility of masterpieces, and artworks different among them, levels, equalizes their “messages”, their significance, and so long.

“Voici que la miniature s’apparente à la peinture, au vitrail”. 

The photographic reproducibility, that democratizes the history of arta, makes the artworks impoverished, because, once reproduced, they lose their color, or texture, their specificity “au bénéfice de leur style commun”. Malraux is dilemmatic, his argumentation is (productively) ambiguous, let’s say problematic. The photographic reproducibility shapes our gaze, making a detail bigger, or isolating a fragment from the whole object. Who wants to know, to study the history of arts, inevitably, is under the influence of this kind of pattern and framework that forms our valuation and admiration. 

Malraux observes that something is found, and something is lost. He’s anticipated by some thoughts of Benjamin about the difference between the carnal and sensuous experience to live the beauty of a statue in flesh, inside a special living context, and the experience to see and read about that statue in an illustrated book. Malraux explains that the photographic reproducibility enlarge our knowledge, because it brings within our gaze the artworks disseminated along the entire world, but in the passage between the “représentation théâtrale”, that still implies the museum, and “la lecture des pièces”, inside a book, is similar to the passage from to listening Beethoven played by an orchestra and reproduced through a vinyl. Malraux names this phenomenon: intellectualization. It’s the price to pay for having, for the first time in the history, a shared world, a common “héritage du monde”. Philosophically, we could say that, for example, Wittgenstein suggested that more than a passage or rupture between the Beethoven’s Sonata and the vinyl, there’s a sort of translation governed by a “rule of projection”, but, in this “linguistic game”, is more interesting to suggest, against Malraux, or in a divergent way to him, that this “héritage du monde” is not peacefully shared. At the time of the publishing of his book, France still was a colonialist state – later will replace this policy with another one more subtle called postcolonialism – and there was any common or shared world, like Chris Marker and Alain Resnais show in their Les statues meurent aussi? (1950-53), putting in images and sounds the treasures of African culture and arts robbed and scratched, taken away by French colonialism from the African countries occupied with violence. Marker and Resnais addressed their powerful documentary against Malraux. He wanted to create a project for an “imaginaire” museum, today we’d say for a virtual or digital museum. Marker and Resnais remembered to him and to us that the statues die, that we or Malraux can imagine an imaginary or “virtual” museum, because the Western imperialism spoiled the non-Western world during the centuries. The media have technical sides, conventions, and historical context, too. 

Like Burgin put in evidence, Benjamin was more radical and sharp, proposing to break the wall between author and public, replacing this barrier with the role of the author as productor, in affinity with his friend Brecht, and anticipating the Barthes theory: the reader becomes writer. And, maybe, anticipating the Happening, too. For sure, this kind of conception implied the overcome of the walls of the museum, too, including the digital or virtual walls, that today can maybe appear transparent, but they could be at the same time guided algorithmically. 

Burgin comes back to the October, when the artists organized atelier in cooperation with workers to transform the work in art and vice versa.

During the mai ‘68 Marker proposed a militant cinema in order to break with the narrative of cinema and media, that according to Marker were tools to share ideology, and to fix the working class in a certain place. Marker suggested that for producing this kind of cinema, it was necessary to take a step behind. Who had to do it? Himself, and the other filmmakers marxist-oriented. Filmmakers like him had to give tools to the workers and letting them to do something, to film, to create, to show their condition, and their horizon of struggle, to avoid a stereotypical representation of the working class made by filmmakers that were not workers, and that viewed the former from a point of view privileged, from a distant point of view. Another conception faced by Marker and of his group “Medvedkin”, was that of Jean-Pierre Thorn and the group named “Ligne Rouge”. They wanted to educate the working class, showing to the workers how to use tools to make a very fine product, and not only a tool of propaganda. And Godard? He said that the workers don’t know the language of cinema, and how to show the contradiction of the capitalistic society; but the filmmakers don’t know anything about struggles and strikes. Godard did not put his camera in the hands of workers, but neither filming and editing to look artsy. His position was a work in progress rather than a clear manifesto. 

Anyway, Godard – even inspired, among others, by Malraux, with whom had a complicated relationship – proposed another kind of Atlas more open and critical, that offers a variegated ensemble and montage of the history of media and the history tout court in his Histoire(s) du 

cinéma (1988-98). His Histoire(s) remains a lesson still today, an epoch in which we are daily absorbed in an incessant audio-visual environment, connected to a digital nervous system whose complex functioning is a perpetual ongoing. Why? Le Histoire(s) du cinéma is a sort of summa and assemblage of his whole multimedia-work, an articulation of an intermodal network, a montage of sounds, images, tales, through which Godard “makes” the history. It’s and inquiry and, at the same time, an intervention to modify the history, using, through a sort of détournement what the tradition of arts and cinema, and the technology makes available, in affinity with that Gayatri Spivak has been suggesting trying to combine humanities and technology, in her case, through she calls ab-use. So, the Histoire(s) is a lesson and example, not only because of inquiry very penetrant, but also, and mainly, because show use how to ab-use of technology and tradition, too, remembering to us, that the History is the “medium”, the element in which the stories are produced, the media are generated, the media that tell and show stories that can fix or liberate. And, in the end, Histoire(s) du cinéma makes clear that cinema and media are in connection with the capitalist mode of production, and with that who Adorno called “culture industry”, that media, new and old ones, are apparatus of subjection and subjectivation. This goes to Foucault, of course, and Foucault many times said that where there’s power, there’s also resistance. 

Coming back to Benjamin, cinema, and the other media, old and new ones, not choosing naively good messages or good intentions, but through détournement and ab-use can be used to force and change their form (and not the content) of the media themselves, like Brecht already suggested, and the form of our life, too. To end, we can say that the right approach is that formulated by Bernard Stiegler: a pharmacology. After all, already Marx once said that the solution is in the problem. 

Burgin quotes Adorno, and Pasolini to suggest being more prudent or less optimistic. Maybe. From ‘40 to ‘70, mass culture and mass media enforced “conformity through pleasure”, and

consumerism remodeled and deformed – according to Pasolini – the consciousness of masses. To be more complete, we need to add that, for example, in the same decades about, a critical thinker and media scholar like Stuart Hall, never ceased to say that the more or less sophisticated process of codification – the ideology shared by mass media, and other channels of what Foucault called Archive – is working not in a transparent and linear way, and, above all, that those that we call subaltern classes or groups are not merely passive, and that their decodification can be a real and effective sabotage. In his Introduction wrote for the book Thinking Photography, Burgin observes that the advertisers’ beliefs are not “simply ‘communicated’ to their audiences”. 

For sure, today, with the digital empowerment that casts a global net over the whole planet, consumerism is more invasive, for example through the digital environment, for work or fun, or AI. We daily live in a digital unconsciousness, we are always connected to the screens, a multiplicity of screens. Burgin quotes Vivian Sobchack who describes the condition of the screenness, a link, both material and immaterial, between the online and offline living. Burgin writes that the real change came not with the introduction of digital cameras, that makes each of us a photographer, an artist, or, at least, an influencer. The big break was when the digital cameras started to be connected with the complex of Internet, the field of an ocean of data. Lyotard at the end of ‘80, wrote that photography brings to its end, and goal, a sort of capitalist program of meta-political order of what is visual and social. He said that it was enough a click made by an amateur or a tourist, and they make their own frame in which they organize and visualize an identification space. I wonder what Lyotard could say today… Meanwhile, Burgin offered us a thought about it. In a conversation with Katrina Sluis, published at the end of his book, he says that asking today what are the limits of photography, means asking what are the limits of theology, not only technology. It’s a question about the existence of God, or the existence itself that cannot be thought of without this connection with photography, and technology. Brugin writes in that book of 1982: 

“It is almost as unusual to pass a day without seeing a photograph as it is to miss seeing writing. In one institutional context or another – the press, family snapshots, billboards, etc. – photographs permeate the environment, facilitating the formation/reflection/inflection of what we ‘take for granted’. The daily instrumentality of photography is clear enough, to sell, inform, record, delight”. 

Now the daily instrumentality is digital, and its power of permeating and shaping our lives is larger. The readability itself of what we call reality depends on a multi-matrix of connections, that is an arena or battlefield, more than a big plan designed by someone. Burgin remembers that in his book about photography (Thinking Photography) – it was 1982 – there was already the problem that photography was not a mere medium, but a form in which people daily encounter reality. During the ‘60 Malcolm Morley painted photographs because these were already desires, ready-made images, and, at the same time, a trigger to engine the imaginary, and the power of the bodies – not that was at the center of the philosophy of Spinoza, but the other one described by Lacan, and Althusser: a net. Photography, writes Burgin, is not a transparent window, “but a site of contested

interpretations”. The arrival of AI changes “the role of the image as a vehicle of ideology”, embodying verbal and visual landscapes and tools in a new dispositif. After all, photography, like Burgin wrote in The End of Art Theory. Criticism and Postmodernity (1986), has also been a counter-attack of the modernist idea or cliché of the logocentric authorship. Returning to Benjamin, for Burgin, does not mean having some appeal to get an academy career or organize symposium about media or AI. On the contrary, it urges to enquire the potentiality of these new media, of this technological world in which we live, to reduce, and, maybe, to cut off its usage under the control of the capitalist machinery, to increase exploitation, and extraction, making larger the gap between multitudes that produce, and élites that are réntier. 

The same problem calls us about the role of AI generative creativity inside the artworld. But here I should start another essay.

Toni D’Angela