PRODUCTION) REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
17
that any meaningful apprehension of the present day is radically contingent upon our ability to read the constellations that arise from elements of a past that is synchronous with Ollr own time and its representative cultural forms. MICHAEL
W.
JENNINGS
Notes 1. We have reproduced here the second version of Benjamin's essay, the version that Benjamin himself considered the "master version,>' or Urtext. For a full discussion of the status of this version in relation to the others, and for a brilliant presentation of the problem of cinema in the artwork essay, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Room for Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema," October, 109 (Summer 2004): 3-45. 2. "What is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their age, bur to represent the age that perceives them-our the age during which they arose. It is this that makes literature into an organon of history. " Benjamin, "Literary History and the Study of Literature" in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 464. 3. On RiegPs historiography, see Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University 1987), pp. 151-163. 4. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985), p. 215. 5. Benjamin, Review of Oskar Walzel, Das Wortkunstwerk, in Gesammelte Schriftel1} vol. 3 {Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972}, p. 50. 6. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, "Production-Reproduction," in Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (New York: Metropolitan Nluseum of Art, 1989), pp.79-82. 7. For a more general discussion of technology and the senses in Benjamin's autobiographical writings, see Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), especially chs. 3 and 4. 8. See 1, sections XIII and XV, in this volume. 9. Benjamin, "Children's Literature," in Selected Writings. vol. 2, p. 251 (translation slightly modified). 10. See Chapter 1, section III. 11. See Chapter 28 in this volume for Benjamin's early use of the term "aura." For the later definition, see Chapter 1, section IV. 12. See Chapter 1, section V.