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Introduction.

Article Excerpt
For writers and publishers contending with Google settlements and electronic copyright questions, the issue of "technological reproduction" remains as current, and as in need of critical reflection, as it was when Walter Benjamin wrote "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (1939), a text that is cited more than once in this issue. With particular reference to early-twentieth-century developments in photography, cinematography, and phonograph recording, Benjamin describes the technological reproduction of artworks--the capacity to mass produce duplicate copies of a work of art--as "something new" (252) in world history, and as "the signature of a perception whose 'sense for sameness in the world' has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique" (256). But Benjamin's concept of "reproducibility" is not about sameness. Samuel Weber makes this point profoundly in Benjamin's -abilities. Rather than designating a process ("reproduction" or "duplication") that is "traditionally considered to be ancillary, secondary, supplementary" to a self-contained...

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