Reading Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway in the Age of Digital Reproduction

• Published in: Information, communication & society Vol. 5; no. 4; pp. 591 - 624
• Main Author: Franklin, Marianne I
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2002
• Subjects: Art Works; Benjamin, Walter; Feminist Theory; Information Society; Information Technology; Technological Change; Telecommunications
• ISSN: 1369-118X
• DOI: 10.1080/1369118022000028214

Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' has much to offer contemporary analyses of the 'Information Age.' This article rereads this famous essay in light of a later intervention by Donna Haraway, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.' There are strong parallels & overlaps between these two groundbreaking pieces, despite their many differences. Both deal with how their respective generations of 'new' information & communication technologies (ICTs) are intertwined with broader sociocultural & political economic change. Both apply controversial, Marxian, theoretical insights to changes in the mode of (re)production in their analyses of techno-economic change that herald both negative & positive political possibilities. This article takes Benjamin & Haraway in turn, their lives & their work in general, & these two essays in particular. It concludes with a brief discussion on how Benjamin's & Haraway's optimistic takes on technological change -- as political opportunity, despite less than optimal tendencies in the political economic & technical apparatus of their respective ages -- can contribute to fleshing out theory & research on ICTs. It does this without lurching between the positions of extreme pessimism or optimism that characterize the debates to date. 67 References. Adapted from the source document.