The Age of Non-Reproducibility
The Age of Non-Reproducibility

Summary/Abstract: Ever since Walter Benjamin’s famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction it is a central idea of media theory – or approaches related to that field – that media enhance and accelerate reproduction and copying. Technologies like the copier, distributed since the 1960s add to this idea. The step from analogue to digital media seemed even more to be an increase in reproducibility. The difference between original and copy seemed to vanish at all. This loss of difference between original and copy is also a central topic in postmodernist theories of ‘simulation,’ which are especially connected with the name of Jean Baudrillard. The essay tries to sketch a short history of theories of reproducibility, copy and simulation – and to show their limits. Obviously the permanent increase of reproducibility needs also an increase in technologies to prevent copying, e.g. in regard to money or documents like the passport. So the history of reproducibility has a shadow: the history of techno-juridical ensembles of non-reproducibility.

• Details
• Contents