Artistic Performance, Technique, and Play. Walter Benjamin on Performing Arts

Since its publication in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility has become a fundamental text when dealing with the status of the arts in modern and postmodern culture. Interestingly, the essay has been taken into account by very few performance scholars. Is it therefore completely irrelevant for Performance Studies? And has it got nothing to say even for this new field of research that examines the relationship between performance and philosophy? Benjamin was especially concerned with the ability of new technologies – film, sound recording, and photography – to overcome the “here and now” of work of art, its “unique existence” in a particular place. We could therefore gather that the essay is mostly useful when dealing with mediatized performances. On the contrary, my point is that it could illuminate the nature and functions of the whole world of performance, as it regards performance as both an object of study and a theoretical tool. Benjamin’s ideas are useful especially as far as they explore questions that we could refer to as the relations between orality, literacy and digitality. Key notions are some dialectical concepts (“polarities” in Benjamin’s terms): not only the well known opposition between “cult value” and “exhibition value” but also (and perhaps more important) the distinctions between “first technology” and “second technology” and between “artistic performance” (Kunstleistung) and “test performance” (Testleistung), and the interweaving of “semblance” (Schein) and “play” (Spiel) in the mimesis as the “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen) of all artistic activity.