This essay was a prizewinner at the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival.
From Replicas to Simulacra: The Modern Turn in Cultural Consumption
I. Foreword
Walter Benjamin, who lived in the early twentieth century, experienced at first hand the immense changes that large-scale industrialization brought to culture and art. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he argued that mass industrial reproduction shattered the “aura” the artwork had once possessed—its authenticity, its unique status. Artistic creation fused with the industrial production of culture, embedded itself deep in the fabric of society, and became a politicized operation.
In Benjamin’s day, the newly emerging media of art were paper print, photographs, film stock, celluloid, and the like, and the reproductions circulating through these media gradually shook off the constraint of the ancient principle of “copying reality” and turned toward reproducing themselves. The consequence of this development was the ceaseless expansion of the virtual; through cultural amusement, the logic of capital seemed already to have completed its “covert control” of the masses. In short, whether for capital, fascism, or communism, art in a certain sense became an instrument by which these political subjects influenced the masses, and it was in this sense that Benjamin proposed a “politicized art” to counter fascism.
With the information age, the media of art took a digital turn: digital cameras, the internet, computer software, and electronic screens became the new media of art. This time, the transformation stripped the mechanical replica of its “prototype” altogether, turning it into a “simulacrum” that proliferates in the form of code. At the same time, because digital technology is open, the masses acquired the capacity for cultural creation, and the existing mode of cultural consumption was overturned once again. How the changes in cultural media brought by technological progress affect cultural production, and thereby transform cultural consumption and even the cultural form of society, has thus become a crucial question.
II. The Coded Replica
1. The Myth of Integral Realism
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin analyzed the changes that reproduction technology brought to art in creation, in cognition, and even in politics, and Stiegler’s philosophy of technics carried this inquiry forward. Stiegler characterizes reproduction as an ever-expanding fiction:
“This techno-science-fiction is itself an absolute revolution within the question of transmission (and, again, of reproduction): techno-science-fiction is a reproduction-as-fiction industry, sometimes described as reproductive fiction … production of diabolical beings who threaten the world as ‘the Devil.’”1
Stiegler speaks of the fictional character of technical reproduction from the standpoint of subjective human reception; more precisely, what concerns him is the question of “what we want.” Under the mass production of the technical industries, people’s desire to know “reality” is submerged by the “invention” of possible things, and this is why the reproductive industry of technoscience appears as a demon threatening the world. On a naive Enlightenment faith, the mission of science should be to disclose to people “the truth of nature” and satisfy their essentialist pursuit of “reality”; technical reproduction, however, relies on the “possibility” of things. It is not bound by reality—rather, it turns possibility into reality, which is to say, it produces reality. This inversion yields an endlessly proliferating fiction, dragging society into a symbolic space governed by cultural production. Stiegler names this kind of reproduction “reproducibility”—production that is reproduction from the outset, that is, serial production without an original.2
Yet in the era when Benjamin wrote “Little History of Photography,” photography as a technology of reproduction seemed, precisely, to satisfy the pursuit of the myth of truthfulness: the experience of “shock” that photographs brought arose exactly from their instantaneous, integral “copying” of nature. Bazin wrote with full confidence:
The group of lenses that serves as the camera’s eye takes the place of the human eye, and its very name is objectif (the French word for a camera lens, cognate with “objectivity”). For the very first time, between the originating object and its representation, nothing intervenes but another material object. For the first time, an image of the external world is formed automatically, according to a strict determinism, without human intervention or creative participation.3
On this basis Bazin held that “the aesthetic quality of photography lies in its revealing of the real.”4 In another essay he gave this myth a name: the myth of “total cinema”—a cinema that reproduces a phantasm of the external world complete in every respect.5 If cinema had not yet realized this myth of integral realism, that was only because its technology was not yet complete.
Here we see the two senses of “reproduction”: in the transitive sense, the reproduction of something else; in the intransitive sense, self-proliferating reproduction. The photographs Benjamin discusses in “Little History of Photography,” in which a trace of aura still lingered, are undoubtedly reproduction in the first sense, whereas the artworks of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which have dispelled “authenticity” and can be exhibited anywhere and owned by anyone, are reproduction in the second. The two senses are, of course, by no means separate. We may suppose that self-proliferating reproduction presupposes the reproduction of something else, that is, the reproduction of a “prototype”; concretely, the prototype may be reality, a negative, a film’s original print, the original of a literary or artistic work, and so on.
The logic of reproduction, however, is not loyal to the prototype. Photography’s fidelity to reality seems at first glance to be guaranteed by a certain “automatic” operation, but what it captures is precisely not reality; it is the “optical unconscious.” What photography obtains is the image before intentionality has intervened; it makes us see what we never willed to see, bringing us into direct encounter with our unconscious impulses—and “shock” is born of just this encounter. In other words, the photographic image is the construction of “another reality”; the viewer’s identification with the image leads him into this dreamscape and delivers his unconscious over to the image’s disposition. In “Little History of Photography” Benjamin writes: “photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things—meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.”6 The “thoroughly historical variable” that the image as “waking dream” brings with it is precisely the inversion of technology and magic—the image constructs reality in the mode of “re-creation” rather than “representation.” The myth of perfect reproduction is finally exposed as the “fabrication of reality”: however closely an image’s content resembles reality, the image completes itself within its own field; the image first fictionalizes itself, and its resemblance to reality becomes, on the contrary, a derivative.
2. The Database of Simulacra
In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard proposed the concept of three orders of the “simulacrum” to describe the historical development of the techniques of counterfeiting:
—The counterfeit is the dominant schema in the “classical” period, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution.
—Production is the dominant schema in the industrial era.
—Simulation is the dominant schema in the current code-governed phase.7
The first-order simulacrum operates on the natural law of value, the second-order simulacrum on the market law of value, and the third-order simulacrum on the structural law of value.
What appeared alongside the Industrial Revolution was the industrial simulacrum of mass production. The universal law of equivalence that reproduction obeys can be established only by eliminating the reference to the prototype. This means that “production,” in its logical essence, excludes the “prototype”; counterfeiting deprived of a prototype thus becomes the counterfeiting of itself: “the real ultimatum lay in reproduction itself. Production itself has no meaning: its social finality is lost in the series. Simulacra prevail over history.”8
When the mass repetition of a given prototype finally becomes the mass repetition of replicas, and primitive accumulation finally becomes capital’s self-valorization, we enter the age of the third-order simulacrum. The production of third-order simulacra is like a word-chain game: one character joins the next, no definite meaning is required, and the continuation of the string is itself the purpose of production.
There are models from which all forms proceed according to modulated differences. Only affiliation to the model has any meaning, since nothing proceeds in accordance with its end any more, but issues instead from the model, the “signifier of reference,” functioning as a foregone, and the only credible, conclusion.
In fact, it is in the genetic code that the “genesis of simulacra” today finds its completed form. At the limits of an ever more forceful extermination of references and finalities, of a loss of semblances and designators, we find the digital, programmatic sign, which has a purely tactical value, at the intersection of other signals (“bits” of information/tests) and which has the structure of a micro-molecular code of command and control.9
If in the first-order simulacrum we find marble statues and baroque or impressionist painting, and in the second-order simulacrum political propaganda posters and film posters, then in the third-order simulacrum all we can find are combinations of signs. We can find such things in a typical mode of consumption in the digital age—otaku consumption—for instance, in the game project Hyperdimension Neptunia. From the very beginning, the project was built on personified figures of several sponsoring companies: the “characters” were designed first, and the other elements that make up the game’s main content were filled in afterward. Although this promotional project offered no thrilling plot and no outstanding game mechanics, it won broad acclaim among otaku. From the design of its protagonist, Neptune,10 one can already see the consuming mechanism at work—the consumption of codes. A personified game console, purple hair, a loli character, pajama-like “moe” clothing: these elements point either to the gaming culture that shares the otaku cultural sphere, or to the “moe-elements” that, recurring across the long history of anime character design, have taken on the status of a “tradition.” The object of consumption is not so much the content of the game itself as this ceaseless extension toward another textual chain. The example reveals that behind the theory of simulacra lies a generative model: the chain of texts left behind by the ceaseless translation and reproduction of codes itself becomes the site where simulacra are generated.
In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, the Japanese critic Hiroki Azuma argues that although Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra speaks of the vanishing of the prototype, it presents the generation of simulacra simply as disorderly proliferation, failing to see that after the collapse of the tree structure centered on the prototype, its place was taken by the so-called “database” model, which formed a new law, a new “tradition.”11
The “database”12 is an apt figure for the source of simulacra. Just as the character above can be decomposed into a combination of codes, almost every modern article of cultural consumption can be decomposed in the same way. Certain fragmentary features are repeated again and again across works, thereby acquiring the status of a “tradition,” and are then cited again and again in later works. Over time, a set of fixed, emblematic signs takes shape within a given cultural sphere (like the Che Guevara T-shirt), and these signs can be recombined at any moment into new articles of cultural consumption. In this sense we may say that The Avengers series was born within the cultural sphere/database of American comics and Marvel—a work of the same kind as Hyperdimension Neptunia.
This mode of cultural consumption consists in ceaselessly reading information out of the database, like clicking links on the web and browsing one related page, related article, related video after another. The structure of the database is, one might say, the very structure of the web; Azuma calls it a “hyperflat” structure—the plane still exists, yet things that exceed the plane are juxtaposed alongside it13 (hyperlinks). The act of clicking a link does not raise us from browsing the plane to some higher state; it merely jumps to the next plane. Although it is the grand nonnarrative (the database) that generates small narratives, the reading of a small narrative cannot be traced back to the former. The grand nonnarrative cannot even be properly described: it is composed of countless planes woven together by hyperlinks, always in a process of continuous change, of forming new connections. One might say the grand nonnarrative is “virtual,” like “pure recollection” in Bergson’s sense; through metonymy and other mechanisms it flows through everything written and produced (the image that reflects this process most aptly is “related recommendations/you may also like”), and the making of a work is nothing but the actualization of this virtual flow—the reestablishment of connections among drifting elements (signifiers) so that they become readable sentences (the formation of new planes in the database; derivative works and “meme-play” can both be regarded as such planes). “Readable” does not mean “meaningful”: just as the word-chain game can be played without understanding the words’ meanings, readability guarantees only that a text can connect to further texts, whereas “meaning” always involves something beyond the text. This also means that our browsing is nothing more than an endlessly continued word-chain game.
Staring at electronic screens, modern people merely repeat, compulsively, this kind of “reading”—the reading of information stripped of meaning, or rather reading for reading’s sake, the pure “reproduction” that feeds one string of characters into another. This is precisely the experience given to us by the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, or more exactly, of digital reproduction. Yet this is only the conclusion of an analysis that starts from the change in the artwork’s form itself; what should not be neglected is a rereading of the problem against the larger background of changes in social structure. The examples of the two films below sketch the new situation of the modern subject, and we will see, in the end, what kind of cultural ecology the cultural consumers of this new situation have produced around the art forms described above.
III. The Situation of the Cultural Consumer
1. Two Images of the “Masses”
The ceaseless expansion of reproduction overturned the ruling position of the “prototype,” and the Platonic, Idea-theoretic worship of the “real” collapsed along with the withering of aura. As the form of the artwork changed, the paradigm of artistic production/cultural production changed with it. Moreover, once the mystically tinged aura had withered, the ground of the artwork’s existence shifted from a ritual-laden specific site into the political domain: the “original,” for instance, became “copyright” protected by bourgeois law, and the production of works passed from private commission to culture-industry production oriented by forecasts of market demand (and therefore by the logic of capital).
Such changes linked the masses and art as never before, letting art penetrate deep into the fabric of society. Benjamin writes: “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.”14 He did not rashly conclude that, because the masses participated in artistic production, they had gained a means of expressing themselves through art. On the contrary, what he saw first was the “covert control” that artistic amusement exercises over the masses, and it was on that basis that he explored the possibility of mobilizing them.
The masses appear in artistic production not as a subject but always as the object represented and shaped; the masses have not obtained their own “power” through artistic production. The split image of the masses can easily be seen in the following two examples. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), the Soviet film depicting the Russian revolution of 1905, the representation of the “masses” runs throughout, and it became the most powerful instrument for propagating the revolutionary spirit. In the third part, “Blood for Blood,” two of Eisenstein’s montage sequences are especially typical. The first consists of three shots of people passing beneath a bridge on their way to the harbor to mourn a sailor killed for launching the uprising. Eisenstein makes full use of the bridge above, the stairs on either side, and the passage below, expressing the firm, unified will of the “masses” through spatially layered, ordered, and dense streams of people. The second sequence depicts the scene before the murdered sailor’s remains, where popular feeling boils over and the people resolve to resist tsarist tyranny. In the first shot, an orator-like figure stands slightly above the crowd, speaking passionately toward the right; in the second, the crowd faces the left of the frame, echoing the orientation of the previous shot. The third shot moves into close-up, expressing the people’s long-suppressed anger through the detail of a sturdy arm tightly clenching the hem of a garment; the fourth shot again answers the previous one, expressing the eruption of that anger.
The crowd is effectively organized, presented as marching masses, motionless masses, shouting masses, and masses with arms raised high—that is, as a forceful, unitary “mass” that is a subject of action. Eisenstein’s montage constructs an image for the masses, confers order on an otherwise disordered ensemble, and sets up a grammar of the image through particular ways of joining shots, so as to express abstract “concepts.” Similar uses can be seen in many films marked by Soviet montage. Even though the mass audience of the time may have overlapped to a high degree with the masses displayed in the films—so much so that one could speak of “self-display”—the displayed image of the masses has necessarily already been disposed by the grammar of film, subordinated to the idea that montage seeks to express. It is in this sense, too, that Benjamin held that the amusement of film “covertly controls the masses” and might possibly mobilize them: the “masses” must first be constructed on the screen before the people seated below can find their own image in that “mass.” Although the possibility of the masses’ self-expression exists, more often the filmgoer is merely shaped through identification with the image’s “figure of the masses.”
The other example shows precisely the opposite. In the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves (1948), the masses appear throughout as a disorderly crowd, and the protagonist too is stripped of every halo and reduced to one of their number. Deleuze comments:
The identification is actually inverted: the character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action.15
This description fits closely the sense of loss the protagonist displays throughout the film. His actions are no longer guaranteed by traditional film narrative; he has lost his hold on the situation. The old schema—“the character acts, the situation reacts”—has broken down; the balance between character and situation is destroyed, and the protagonist, caught in a “pure optical and sound situation,” finds that he can only look on helplessly, submerged in the human tide. Take, for instance, the following sequence in which the protagonist searches for his stolen bicycle. From the first to the second shot, we pass into the protagonist’s point-of-view shot and see the disorderly crowd; in the objective third shot, the protagonist seems all at once to vanish into the crowd, and only when we notice a man hesitating in place in the pouring rain do we pick him out again. The high-angle fourth shot reinforces this powerlessness still further, until we finally recognize that the protagonist too is merely one of the crowd, who owes this episode of running from place to place only to the theft of his bicycle.
In Bicycle Thieves, crowds in fact occupy an even greater proportion of the film than in Battleship Potemkin, yet these people milling about and clamoring have nothing whatever to do with words like “order” and “unity.” The film presents no “image of the masses” at all, for we cannot even find what the word “masses” would refer to; what is presented is nothing but unbearable, all-too-real, inert everyday life—objects and characters refuse to yield any meaning beyond themselves. Bicycle Thieves uses long takes in quantity, yet often only to film the protagonist walking from one end of a street to the other, or trivial scraps of daily life. These long takes make the film’s time indolent, deprived of any particular theme, and leave the audience at a loss—in the audience’s common sense, film editing seems to carry an obligation to guide them, to hint at “what this segment is expressing,” but the neorealist long take is precisely the cancellation of that obligation; it attempts thereby to present something more “real,” something unmanipulated. And the audience’s bewilderment is the protagonist’s bewilderment: the bewilderment of the powerless individual who has lost the promise of subjecthood held out by the “masses.” The grammar of film no longer envelops the protagonist, conferring meaning on his every move; he therefore finds himself in helplessness, forced to watch and to record, yet unable to make any effective response. This is the exact opposite of the montage described above, where the protagonist’s discourse achieved expression at the level of the concept through the “magic” of editing—or rather, where the protagonist’s image itself became an apparatus of expression, soliciting people’s identification. Seen in this light, neorealism’s pure optical and sound situations and long takes are precisely a disenchantment of the magic of montage.
From this we can see that a split image of the “masses” dwells within the individual of the age of mechanical reproduction. On the one hand, the social/political entity makes the individual a promise of sovereignty, absorbing every citizen into that forceful, unitary myth of the masses; on the other hand, the individual discovers himself amid a strange, disorderly human tide, able only to watch and record helplessly everything before his eyes, unable to make any effective response. Under the new logic of artistic production, cultural production has been conscripted by political power; in this situation, it is not so much that the individual still cannot secure his own voice as that the individual is captured by cultural production itself—only by identifying himself as a member of the first kind of “masses” can he escape the dreadful condition of helplessness.
2. The Cultural Tribespeople of the Postmodern
In a lecture titled “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” Stiegler pointed out that with the development of the culture industry the consumer’s sensibility became proletarianized, this “proletarianization” meaning the loss of knowledge16—the person who listens to music over the radio loses the knowledge of performance, and the person who admires paintings in paper print knows nothing of the painter’s craft. This technological development pauperized the knowledge of amateurs and degraded them into cultural consumers.
However, as digital technology replaced industrial technology, a second machinic turn of sensibility took place. The instruments of cultural production once controlled by capital’s marketing and the culture industry were digitized and opened to the public, and everyone can now master video editing, postproduction, digital drawing, and other techniques by learning computer software. This shift brought a renaissance of the amateur, and cultural consumers at last seized back partial control of the libidinal economy:
What is the amateur, if not a figure of libidinal economy? The amateur “loves” (amat, from the Latin verb amare, “to love”): this is precisely what makes the amateur an amateur. What the amateur of art loves is the work of art. And insofar as they love works of art, those works of art also act upon them.
Every work of art is, to some degree, a revelation of itself; only by exposing itself as a revelation can it truly expose itself, and in this way a kind of doctrine takes shape. In certain cases this gives rise to schools, coteries, certain sects, and sometimes it even leads to schism. Kant says that when I regard a work of art as beautiful, I necessarily suppose that everyone ought to find it beautiful; and yet, deep in my heart, I know that things will not be as I would have them, and never can be.17
What Stiegler reveals here is, first, the political condition under which the artwork of the digital age comes into being: it is because of the amateur’s love that art becomes art, and culture and its devotees are constructed together in this process. Further, the passage also reveals the tribalist condition of digital-age culture: precisely because culture arises from the amateur’s fetishistic love, corresponding “congregations” form beneath the “idol” of culture, repeating certain doctrines inwardly and opposing other congregations outwardly. Combined with the earlier analysis of the “database” form of culture, we may say that each congregation internally shares a smaller database, which sits within a larger database and stands opposed to the other databases beneath it—a set-theoretic structure of discourse systems nested one within another.
Thus, although the “helpless subject” of our earlier analysis must identify with some “mass,” in the postmodern condition this “mass” is not necessarily the “whole people” written large; it can be decomposed into countless “masses” written small. If this helpless subject throws himself into the arms of culture and becomes the amateur of some culture, then the “mass” with which he identifies will be some “fan circle,” some “cultural sphere,” in which he can form ties with others, use a shared system of discourse, and share—even jointly create—articles of cultural consumption.
What such a mode of cultural consumption brings, however, is the tribalization of culture:
Unlike the “grand narratives” represented by history, the “small narratives” generated from the database hold no ground for such demarcation (that is, the “public standard” drawn by a sovereign). Hence, in order to defend their own legitimacy and their habitat—in order to expel noise and mismatched elements from their own identity, in order to distinguish friend from enemy, inside from outside, all the more strictly—the many small narratives must exclude and attack other narratives. The commonality of the small narratives generated from the database is therefore exclusionary in character.18
The Japanese critic Tsunehiro Uno takes up Azuma’s discussion of database culture and exposes the problem of the exclusionary society it produces—that is, the problem of how people in different cultural spheres/small narratives are to communicate. Azuma, extending the logic of database theory, holds that the products generated in the database (“characters”) are related to one another, and that the web of relations among codes opens the possibility of communication between different small narratives. Against this, Uno objects that although characters can be reduced to signs possessing a certain commonality, the process by which a character is established is precisely the negation of the factors that construct it—only by negating its originary constructedness can an exclusionary narrative be established, and only then does worshipful identification with that narrative become possible:
Strictly speaking, the character is not a kind of sign. For a character to be established, the commonality of the character’s settings must be acknowledged, and this is because commonality is prescribed by a story (narrative). The character becomes independent of the original work and is then altered and consumed in derivative works, and this process reinforces, at the meta level, both the acknowledgment of the commonality of those settings and the story (narrative) that prescribes that commonality.
Azuma’s discussion fails to notice this point. Azuma advances the concept of the “character” in database consumption as a kind of “critique of narrative.” But the character is very often what supplies and supplements commonality. It would not be too much to call the character the wellspring of “small narratives.”
Technically speaking, a community connecting the whole world is indeed possible, but at the level of narrative it is impossible. What is connected here is a small narrative without internal discrepancy, open only to those who acknowledge the character’s settings. Azuma holds that the character is a free being able to transcend “small narratives” (or a sign-like element representing such a being), and his claim overlooks the points above.19
Seen from the standpoint of the production of works, postmodern digital technology seems to give us a broad cultural space of connection and sharing—people can freely draw codes from all kinds of databases, add their own creativity, and manufacture new images-characters-works. On this view, the character, as an assemblage of multiple codes, might seem able, through its measure of universality, to become a “sign” linking different cultural spheres. But Uno points out that this is precisely an inverted logic: the work/character image pieced together from fragments of code negates, at the moment of its birth, the very fact that “it is pieced together,” molds an essential image for itself, presents itself as something unique, and becomes the source of an exclusionary narrative—an “idol.” To regard the character as something independent of small narratives is to misunderstand completely the logic of database cultural consumption. The commonality between characters visible at the meta level cannot possibly become a channel of communication for the “believers”; if anything, the resemblance between characters can even provoke a repulsion akin to the defense of a faith—the conviction that only the character one identifies with may occupy those signs; and if such resemblance leads someone to misrecognize a character, it invites only the mockery reserved for the “clueless.” The disposition this refracts is precisely the tribe’s exclusionism.
The postmodern database mode of cultural consumption possesses in itself no critical purchase on systems of discourse; that is to say, the “cultural tribespeople” immersed in small narratives cannot find within them any possibility of “communication” (with the other). In fact, the cultural tribe is founded precisely on the exclusion of that possibility; genuine “communication” is nothing but the myth of this era. In the postmodern condition of the decline of culture’s grand narratives, people need no longer identify with the political aesthetics, written large, that Battleship Potemkin displays, yet the moderns released from that obligation can only live inside closed cultural tribes.
Hence, to criticize cultural consumption merely from the broad oppositional perspective of “the culture industry under capital’s control will manipulate individual taste” still misses the point. The more pressing problem is that the cultural ecology itself is moving ever further toward an isolating, exclusionary tribalism. This is not only a problem of production, an “external” problem; it is first of all a problem of cultural reception, an “internal” problem—it is not that some conspiratorial, gigantic capitalist machine separates people from one another, but that the tribespeople must refuse communication; or rather, cultural reception is founded precisely on the refusal of communication, and the form of culture encourages this exclusionary character. Worse still, the following possibility exists: the artistic images and discourse systems molded by the culture industry may drown the small, scattered tribes, each fighting on its own, bringing about a “third machinic turn of sensibility”—the great cultural machine conscripting the creativity of the amateurs and erecting a “unified” social aesthetic and cultural standard. Aesthetic standards can never truly be unified, but they can be “sovereign”: in the immense figure of the “social whole,” such a standard would suppress every narrative outside itself. Works of art and literature will once again be branded with the stamp of politics—only this time not in the name of political ideology, but in the name of “mass taste.”
IV. Conclusion
In the contemporary context, artistic aesthetics and cultural consumption are bound together more tightly than ever, and their political character has not weakened in the slightest since Benjamin’s day: this compound has become the new form of social bond after the dissolution of traditional interpersonal ties, and it doubles as an object of “belief,” though that function has lost its former sacred meaning. The cultural consumer remains that powerless figure, captured by images, compulsively repeating the act of viewing; yet the database model has also brought new possibilities for cultural creation. Perhaps, like Deleuze, we may hope that the differential repetition of cultural codes can trace lines of flight and escape capture by the dominant discourse; but we must also acknowledge the conservative character inherent in this process of differentiation, and the closedness and exclusivity that the word “aesthetic” implies in the modern context.
This closed character does not arise from the subjectivity of aesthetic sensibility; people do not repel one another because they feel the same work differently. If, in the “shock experience” Benjamin described, people received the onrush of novel stimuli through sensibility, then in the contemporary aesthetics of the simulacrum the function of sensibility has all but retreated backstage, replaced by the function of “reading”—the elements composing a work are translated into writing, extending textual chains within the database. Every mechanism of expression has become “citable.” What breeds exclusivity here is not the universal capacity to read, but the context and objects of reading: the particular database and cultural sphere. That is to say, it is not aesthetic experience itself but the situation in which the aesthetic subject stands that brings closedness; this aesthetic subject is still captured by the work, only this time not merely in a passive, sensory overwhelming, but in an active one…
The Chinese labels decompose Neptune’s design into “moe elements”: a childlike apparent age, purple hair and matching eyes, exaggerated body proportions, gamepad-button hair ornaments that personify a game console, and her name printed prominently on her clothing.
The Chinese labels in Azuma’s database model show a “grand nonnarrative” database generating simulacra by combining shared modes of expression; a different database can likewise generate other kinds of simulacra.
